Heavy metal would rate high on the energy scale and slow acoustic tracks would rate low.To gather this data, I used Charlie Thompson’s fantastic spotifyr package to interface with the Spotify API. sad, depressed, angry).” We can use this to determine how sad a track sounds (independent of lyrics).Įnergy (as defined by Spotify) also rates from 0 to 1 and represents “perceptual measure of intensity and activity”. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g.
Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. Valence is defined by Spotify as: “A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. For this analysis, I focused mainly on two attributes: energy and valence. We can get an idea of musical sadness by using data from the Spotify API, which allows you to extract various musical attributes for a given track (like danceability, speechiness, and liveness). While it doesn’t include all songs, I think it does a good job of picking the most popular version of each song chosen and handily satisfies my “title and artist” requirement. This 60-song playlist contains many classics (“Silver Bells”, “Sleigh Ride”) as well as some modern classics (I’m looking at you, Mariah Carey). I settled for a Spotify’s ‘ Christmas Classics’ playlist. I was hoping for a Buzzfeed “Top 100 Christmas Songs of All Time” list but after checking FiveThirtyEight, Billboard, Spotify, and lots of Google searches, I wasn’t able to come up with anything satisfactory that included both title and artist (which I’d need to gather ‘musical’ track attributes).
(Just think of how many covers are released each year!). The data collection process broke down into three steps: choosing which songs to analyze, using Spotify to extract “musical” information about each song chosen, and using Genius (and Google) to collect the lyrics for each song.Īs it turns out, there are looooots of Christmas songs out there. (Spoiler alert: I was wrong about Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.) With this scene in mind, and without being able to think of any song that was more sad, I set out to use data to find the most depressing Christmas song. I personally realized this while watching an immensely sad scene in The Family Stone centered around Judy Garland singing ‘ Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and haven’t yet fully recovered (or stopped noticing sad Christmas music).
Christmas music can be a lot of things - joyous, ironic, melancholy, cheerful, funny, and, in some cases, downright depressing.
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