This website is meant to guide you through a tour of what I listened to in 2022, in order to shed light on music's relationship to our mood. Each page summarizes a month's worth of my top songs, gives a happiness score to each top song, and an overall happiness score for the month.
I used the spotify api to get the happiness score for each song. Spotify assigns numbers to represent features of each song in their catalogue. Some of the features include: valence (aka happiness), tempo, danceability, and speechiness. They calculate these features computationally, using a variety of traits about a song, such as the loudness, key, and vocals.
The happiness score ranges from 0 to 1. A score close to 0 indicates that the song was percieved by Spotify to be sad. A score close to 1 indicates a song that is happier. Since the happiness of a song is subjective, we should take spotify's rating with a grain of salt. The analysis done in this website is meant to be a jumping off point for discussion about music's affect on our mood.
The happiness score for each song was taken directly from spotify's database. The overall happiness score for each month was done by weighting each song's score by the number of times it was played. Then the sum of these scores was divided by the total number of plays across all 10 top songs. The average happiness score was calculated by taking the mean of the overall happiness scores for all 12 months of 2022.
I used data from the Spotify API to get the happiness scores for each song. Spotify also enabled me to embed each song into the website.
I used this API to embed youtube videos into the website.
This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin
Reading this book made me interested in music's affect on our emotions.
This website uses the space grotesk font from Google Fonts.