Tag Archives: music

Computer, Datasets, Regression

I Got The Feelin’

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Last week, I’ve been going through my CD collection, trying to find records I haven’t been listing for a while. And I got the feeling that music I listen to nowadays is slower than the one I was listening to in my 20’s. I was wondering if that was an age issue, or it was simply the fact that music in the 90s was “faster” than the one released in 2015. So I tried to scrap the BPM database to get a more appropriate answer about this “feeling” I have. I did extract two information: the BPM (beat per minute) and the year (of release).

Here is a function to extract information from the website,

> library(XML)
> extractbpm = function(VBP,P){
+ url=paste("https://www.bpmdatabase.com/music/search/?artist=&title=&bpm=",VBP,"&genre=&page=",P,sep="")
+ download.file(url,destfile = "page.html")
+ tables=readHTMLTable("page.html")
+ return(tables)}

For instance

> extractbpm(115,13)
$`track-table`
Artist Title
1 Eros Ramazzotti y Claudio Guidetti Dimelo A Mi
2 Everclear Volvo Driving Soccer Mom
3 Evils Toy Dear God
4 Expose In Walked Love
5 Fabolous ft. 2 Chainz When I Feel Like It
6 Fabolous ft. 2 Chainz When I Feel Like It
7 Fabolous ft. 2 Chainz When I Feel Like It
8 Fanny Lu Fanfarron
9 Featurecast Ain't My Style
10 Fem 2 Fem Obsession
11 Fernando Villalona Mi Delito
12 Fever Ray Triangle Walks
13 Firstlove Freaky
14 Fito Blanko Pegadito Suavecito
15 Flechazo Del Norte Mariposa Traicionera
16 Fluke Switch/Twitch
17 Flyleaf Something Better
18 FM Static The Next Big Thing
19 Fonseca Eres Mi Sueno
20 Fonseca ft. Maffio & Nayer Eres Mi Sueno
21 Francesca Battistelli Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
22 Frankie Ballard Young & Crazy
23 Frankie J. More Than Words
24 Frank Sinatra The Hucklebuck
25 Franz Ferdinand The Dark Of The Matinée
Mix BPM Genre Label Year
1 — 115 — Sony 2009
2 — 115 — Capitol Records 2003
3 — 115 — — —
4 — 115 — Arista Records 1994
5 Explicit 115 Urban Def Jam/Island Def Jam 2013
6 — 115 Urban Def Jam/Island Def Jam 2013
7 Radio Edit 115 Urban Def Jam/Island Def Jam 2013
8 — 115 Latin Pop Universal Latino 2011
9 Psychemagik Dub 115 — Jalapeno 2012
10 — 115 — Critique Records 1993
11 — 115 — Mt&vi Records/caminante Records 2001
12 Rex The Dog Remix 115 — Little Idiot/Mute 2012
13 — 115 — Jwp Music 2000
14 — 115 Merengue Mambo Crown Loyalty 2012
15 — 115 — Hacienda 2010
16 Album Version 115 — One Little Indian Records 2004
17 — 115 Alternative A&M/Octone 2013
18 — 115 — Tooth & Nail Records 2007
19 — 115 Merengue Mambo 10 2012
20 Urban Version 115 — 10 2012
21 — 115 — Word/Fervent/Warner Bros 2009
22 — 115 Country Warner Bros 2015
23 Mynt Rocks Radio Edit 115 — Columbia 2005
24 — 115 Jazz Columbia 1950
25 — 115 New Wave — 2004

We have here one of the few old songs, a 1950 tune by Frank Sinatra. If we scrap the website, with a simple loop (where the bpm is from 40 to 200). Start with

BASE=NULL
> vbp=40
> p=1

and then, a loop based on

> while(vbp<=2017){
+ F=extractbmp(vbp,p)
+ if(length(F)==1){
+ BASE=rbind(BASE,F[[1]][,c("Artist","Title","BPM","Year")])
+ p=p+1}
+ if(length(F)==0){
+ vbp=vbp+1
+ p=1}}

Then we should clean the dataset

BASE=BASE[-duplicated(BASE),]
BASE=BASE[-which(BASE$Year=="—"),]
BASE$y=as.numeric(as.character(BASE$Year))
BASE$bpm=as.numeric(as.character(BASE$BPM))
BASE=BASE[BASE$y>=1940,]

and we end up with almost 50,000 tunes.

boxplot(BASE$bpm~as.factor(BASE$y),
col="light blue")

Over the past 20 years, it looks like speed of tunes has declined (let us forget tunes of 2017, clearly we have a problem here…)

library(mgcv)
plot(BASE$y,BASE$bpm)
reg=gam(bpm~s(y),data=BASE)
B=data.frame(y=1950:2017)
p=predict(reg,newdata=B)
lines(B$y,p,lwd=3,col="red")

which is confirmed with a (smoothed) regression

p2=predict(reg,newdata=B,se.fit=TRUE)
plot(B$y,p2$fit,lwd=3,col="red",type="l",ylim=c(90,140))
lines(B$y,p2$fit+p2$se.fit)
lines(B$y,p2$fit-p2$se.fit)

even when incorporating the confidence band. Bumps are probably related to smoothing parameters, but indeed, it looks like the average speed of music tune has decreased, from 110-115 in the 90’s to less than 100 nowadays. Now to be honest, I would love to have access to personal information from itunes, deezer or spotify, to get a better understanding (eg when in the week, in the day, do we like to listen to faster music for instance). But so far, I could not have access to such data. Too bad…

Computer, Economics, Maths, Microeconomics

Sorting rows and colums in a matrix (with some music, and some magic)

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This morning, I was working on some paper on inequality measures, and for computational reasons, I had to sort elements in a matrix. To make it simple, I had a rectangular matrix, like the one below,

> set.seed(1)
> u=sample(1:(nc*nl))
> (M1=matrix(u,nl,nc))
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,]    7    5   11   23    6   17
[2,]    9   18    1   21   24   15
[3,]   13   19    3    8   22    2
[4,]   20   12   14   16    4   10

I had to sort elements in this matrix, by row.

> (M2=t(apply(M1,1,sort)))
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,]    5    6    7   11   17   23
[2,]    1    9   15   18   21   24
[3,]    2    3    8   13   19   22
[4,]    4   10   12   14   16   20

Nice, elements are sorted by row. But for symmetric reasons, I also wanted to sort them by column. So from this sorted matrix, I decided to sort elements by column,

> (M3=apply(M2,2,sort))
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,]    1    3    7   11   16   20
[2,]    2    6    8   13   17   22
[3,]    4    9   12   14   19   23
[4,]    5   10   15   18   21   24

Nice, elements are sorted by column now. Wait… elements are also sorted by row. How comes ? Is it some coincidence ? Actually, no, you can try…

> library(scatterplot3d)
> nc=6; nl=5
> set.seed(1)
> u=sample(1:(nc*nl))
> (M1=matrix(u,nl,nc))
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,]    8   23    5   30   10   15
[2,]   11   27    4   29   21   28
[3,]   17   16   13   24   26   12
[4,]   25   14    7   20    1    3
[5,]    6    2   18    9   22   19
> M2=t(apply(M1,1,sort))
> M3=apply(M2,2,sort)
> M3
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,]    1    3    7   14   19   22
[2,]    2    6    9   15   20   25
[3,]    4    8   10   17   23   26
[4,]    5   11   16   18   24   29
[5,]   12   13   21   27   28   30

or use the  following function is two random matrices are not enough,

> doublesort=function(seed=2,nl=4,nc=6){
+ set.seed(seed)
+ u=sample(1:(nc*nl))
+ (M1=matrix(u,nl,nc))
+ (M2=t(apply(M1,1,sort)))
+ return(apply(M2,2,sort))
+ }

Please, feel free to play with this function. Because this will always be the case. Of course, this is not a new result. Actually, it is mentioned in More Mathematical Morsels by Ross Honsberger, related to some story on marching band. The idea is simple: consider a marching band, a rectangular one. Here are my players

> library(scatterplot3d)
> scatterplot3d(rep(1:nl,nc),rep(1:nc,each=nl), as.vector(M1),
+ col.axis="blue",angle=40,
+ col.grid="lightblue", main="", xlab="", ylab="", zlab="",
+ pch=21, box=FALSE, cex.symbols=1,type="h",color="red",axis=FALSE)

Quite messy, isn’t it ? At least, this is what the leader of the band though, since some tall players were hiding shorter ones. So, he brought the shorter ones forward, and moved the taller ones in the back. But still on the same line,

> m=scatterplot3d(rep(1:nl,nc),rep(1:nc,each=nl), as.vector(M2),
> col.axis="blue",angle=40,
+ col.grid="lightblue", main="", xlab="", ylab="", zlab="",
+ pch=21, box=FALSE, cex.symbols=1,type="h",color="red",axis=FALSE)

From the leader’s perspective, everything was fine,

> M=M2
> for(i in 1:nl){
+ for(j in 1:(nc-1)){
+ pts=m$xyz.convert(x=c(i,i),y=c(j,j+1),z=c(M[i,j],M[i,j+1]))
+ segments(pts$x[1],pts$y[1],pts$x[2],pts$y[2])
+ }}

But someone in the public (on the right of this graph) did not have the same perspective.

> for(j in 1:nc){
+ for(i in 1:(nl-1)){
+ pts=m$xyz.convert(x=c(i,i+1),y=c(j,j),z=c(M[i,j],M[i+1,j]))
+ segments(pts$x[1],pts$y[1],pts$x[2],pts$y[2])
+ }}

So the person in the audience ask – one more time – players to move, but this time, to match with his perspective. Since I consider someone on the right, some minor adjustments should be made here

> sortrev=function(x) sort(x,decreasing=TRUE)
> M3b=apply(M2,2,sortrev)

This time, it is much bettter,

> m=scatterplot3d(rep(1:nl,nc),rep(1:nc,each=nl), as.vector(M3b),
+ col.axis="blue",angle=40,
+ col.grid="lightblue", main="", xlab="", ylab="", zlab="",
+ pch=21, box=FALSE, cex.symbols=1,type="h",color="red",axis=FALSE)

And not only from the public’ perspective,

> M=M3b
> for(j in 1:nc){
+ for(i in 1:(nl-1)){
+ pts=m$xyz.convert(x=c(i,i+1),y=c(j,j),z=c(M[i,j],M[i+1,j]))
+ segments(pts$x[1],pts$y[1],pts$x[2],pts$y[2])
+ }}

but also for the leader of the marching band

Nice, isn’t it ? And why is this property always valid ? Actually, it comes from the pigeonhole theorem (one more time), a nice explanation can be found in The Power of the Pigeonhole by Martin Gardner (a pdf version can also be found on http://www.ualberta.ca/~sgraves/..). As mentioned at the end of the paper, there is also an interpretation of that result that can be related to some magic trick, discussing – in picture – a few month ago on http://www.futilitycloset.com/… : deal cards into any rectangular array:

2012-01-26-ranks-and-files-1

Then put each row into numerical order:

ranks and files 2

Now put each column into numerical order:

ranks and files 3

That last step hasn’t disturbed the preceding one: rows are still in order. And that’s a direct result from  pigeonhole theorem. That’s awesome, isn’t it ?