Tom Johnson

Check out some of my data, music theory, and programming projects.

FireCan

Canadian Wildfire Rate of Spread
Animating Canadian Wildfire Spread.

Visualizing the spread of Canadian wildfires by collecting and animating Canadian Wildland Fire Information System maps. So much smoke!

Spotify Genre Networks

Spotify Genre Networks
Do Spotify's genre tags replicate traditional classifications?

Additional work can be found here.

Chance the Rapper, Spotify, and Musical Categorization in the 2010s

Martine Ehrhart
What can we learn about music categorization from Chance the Rapper and his success?

See Briana Younger's work and Hanif Abdurraqib's too!

Image by Martine Ehrhart for Pitchfork.

McGill Billboard Corpus

The top genres from the McGill Billboard corpus.
What kinds of music are in the McGill Billboard corpus?

An analysis of Spotify's metadata for all 691 songs from this influential corpus. Code and explanation are at this link, and a Spotify playlist can be found here.

More info on the corpus and context: here.

Album Durations

Spotify Genre Networks
How has the lengths of popular albums changed over time?

Turns out albums got longer....for awhile!

Tonality and Topic Theory in Modernist Music

Semiotic Code of Tonality as a Topic in Modernist Music
"Tonality as Topic: Opening A World of Analysis for Early Twentieth-Century Modernist Music"

A different application of network methods, via qualitative analysis of modernist music and semiotic meaning.

Chord Progressions in Popular Music

Chart showing frequency of 1950s chord progression over time.
Chord Progressions on Wikipedia

My students were wondering about the relative historical presence of various chord progressions in popular music.

Changing Attributes in Pop Music

Tempo in <em>Billboard</em> Top Tracks over Time
How have the most "measurably" popular songs changed over time?

Tom Johnson

More about me over at this old sporadic blog.