Evolution of the beatles
visualizing how the band's music evolved over time
about
The Beatles became widely regarded as the foremost and most influential act of the rock era. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock and roll, the Beatles later experimented with several musical styles, ranging from pop ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock, often incorporating classical elements and unconventional recording techniques in innovative ways. In the early 1960s, their enormous popularity first emerged as "Beatlemania", but as the group's music grew in sophistication, led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, they came to be perceived as an embodiment of the ideals shared by the counterculture of the 1960s. This work is an attempt to visualize their music, and its evolution over time.
web scraping and data collection
The list of songs above are based off the data scraped from the Beatles' Wikipedia page. Every song is represented by all the different genres it is influenced from. The data for the genres for each song is derived from the information available on every song's wikipedia page. Data was scraped from 226 different web-pages, one for each song. Most common genre influences were grouped separately and the less common genres were grouped under one category - 'others' and given a green color. Every cell in the circular grid above represents one song, with its influences.
variables
The same sources were used to collect the song lengths, song writers, album names, US chart positions and album year, and the process was repeated for each of these variables.
visualizing genres
Representing each Beatles' song with a single genre would not have done justice to their innovative and unconventional music styles. Drawing inspiration from different genres and packaging them into unique music pieces was what I thought is special about their work. With the aim to honor this aspect of their music I decided to represent each of their songs as a combination of colors, where each color depicts a unique genre. This idea generated some unique patterns:
INFOGRAPHIC IN PRINT
To explore and compare the effects of a digital piece with a print piece, I also tried to represented their music in the form of an infographic, employing a square matrix and a blend of different colors to depict each song.