2021 ICM
Problem D: The Influence of Music
Music has been part of human societies since the beginning of time as an essential component of
cultural heritage. As part of an effort to understand the role music has played in the collective
human experience, we have been asked to develop a method to quantify musical evolution. There
are many factors that can influence artists when they create a new piece of music, including their
innate ingenuity, current social or political events, access to new instruments or tools, or other
personal experiences. Our goal is to understand and measure the influence of previously
produced music on new music and musical artists.
Some artists can list a dozen or more other artists who they say influenced their own musical
work. It has also been suggested that influence can be measured by the degree of similarity
between song characteristics, such as structure, rhythm, or lyrics. There are sometimes
revolutionary shifts in music, offering new sounds or tempos, such as when a new genre
emerges, or there is a reinvention of an existing genre (e.g. classical, pop/rock, jazz, etc.). This
can be due to a sequence of small changes, a cooperative effort of artists, a series of influential
artists, or a shift within society.
Many songs have similar sounds, and many artists have contributed to major shifts in a musical
genre. Sometimes these shifts are due to one artist influencing another. Sometimes it is a change
that emerges in response to external events (such as major world events or technological
advances). By considering networks of songs and their musical characteristics, we can begin to
capture the influence that musical artists have on each other. And, perhaps, we can also gain a
better understanding of how music evolves through societies over time.
Your team has been identified by the Integrative Collective Music (ICM) Society to develop a
model that measures musical influence. This problem asks you to examine evolutionary and
revolutionary trends of artists and genres. To do this, your team has been given several data sets
by the ICM:
1) “influence_data”
1
represents musical influencers and followers, as reported by the artists
themselves, as well as the opinions of industry experts. These data contains influencers
and followers for 5,854 artists in the last 90 years.
2) “full_music_data”
2
provides 16 variable entries, including musical features such as
danceability, tempo, loudness, and key, along with artist_name and artist_id for each of
98,340 songs. These data are used to create two summary data sets, including:
a. mean values by artist “data_by_artist”,
b. means across years “data_by_year”.
1
These data were scraped from AllMusic.com
2
These data were obtained from Spotify’s API
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