Audio Features in Taylor Swift’s Grammy-Winning Albums

R

Discover shared musical features in Taylor’s Grammy-winning albums

Published

February 10, 2024

Data Context

The visualization uses TidyTuesday’s Taylor Swift dataset (Oct 2023), whose data context and information can be accessed at this link

taylor_all_songs <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/master/data/2023/2023-10-17/taylor_all_songs.csv')

Research Question

What are the differences in audio features across Taylor Swift’s Grammy-winning albums?

Data Transformation

Code 
grammy_songs <- taylor_all_songs %>%
  filter(album_name %in% c("Fearless", "1989", "folklore", "Midnights")) %>%
  mutate(album_name = fct_relevel(album_name, c("Fearless", "1989", "folklore", "Midnights"))) %>%
  drop_na(danceability) %>%
  group_by(album_name) %>%
  summarize(Danceability = mean(danceability), 
            Energy = mean(energy), 
            Speechiness = mean(speechiness), 
            Acousticness = mean(acousticness), 
            Instrumentalness = mean(instrumentalness),
            Valence = mean(valence))

Data Visualization

Code 
showtext_auto()

ggradar(grammy_songs, values.radar = c("0", "0.4", "0.8"),
        grid.min = 0, grid.mid = 0.4, grid.max = 0.8, 
        font.radar = "Inter",
        grid.label.size = 4, axis.label.size = 4, legend.text.size = 8,
        group.line.width = 0.8, group.point.size = 0,
        group.colours = c("#EFC180", "#18A5DC", "#A5C9A5", "#242E47"), 
        background.circle.colour = "white",
        gridline.mid.colour = "darkgrey",
        legend.position = "right") + 
  labs(title = "Spotify Audio Features of Taylor Swift's Grammy-Winning Albums") +
  theme(
      plot.background = element_rect(fill = "#ffe9ec", color = "#ffe9ec"),
      panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#ffe9ec", color = "#ffe9ec"),
      legend.background = element_rect(fill = "#ffe9ec", color = "#ffe9ec"),
      legend.key = element_rect(fill = NA, color = NA),
      plot.title = element_text(family = "lobstertwo", size = 20, face = "bold", 
                                color = "#2a475e", hjust = 0.5)
  )

The most variations between the albums lie in their energy level and acousticness, with “1989” having the highest average energy score and “folklore” ranking the highest in acousticness. All 4 albums have relatively high average danceability (> 0.5) while scoring low in instrumentalness and speechiness.