Tag: music

Vocal

Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of my favorite vocalists in metal music:

  • James Hetfield (Metallica): Metallica were one of the first metal bands that I listened to and to this day I associate James Hetfield’s powerful voice with metal music.
  • Rob Halford (Judas Priest): I’m amazed by the high notes he can hit.
  • Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden): His vocal range is incredible.
  • Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A Perfect Circle): His voice has a sadness and raw energy to it that I think is simply wonderful.

  • Daniel Tompkins (TesseracT, ex-Skyharbor): Favorite modern metal singer. His cleans, his screaming — all incredible.
  • Chino Moreno (Deftones):  His voice has an ethereal, dream-like quality that is beautiful.
  • Mikael Åkerfeldt (Opeth): 2nd favorite modern metal singer.

  • George Clarke (Deafheaven): His screams are pure, raw energy. Favorite screaming vocals.
  • Ian Kenny (Karnivool): Another singer with an incredible vocal range.

 

Analyze

Inspired by Spotify’s year in music feature (I wrote a post on it as well), I decided to analyze music related data that I had at my disposal. The data that I chose was the list of all the artists that I’ve seen live (78 at the time of doing this analysis).

There were two things that I wanted to surface from this data:

  1. Which genres of music have I seen the most live?
  2. Which artists should I see next, based on the artists I’ve already seen?

To answer both these questions I decided to use the Echo Nest API. And Python. All the code I wrote to analyze the data can be found here. I wrote this code when I should have been sleeping so the quality is not the best. Oh well.

About halfway through writing the code I decided that generating a word cloud for #1 would be cooler than simply listing the top genres. After failing miserably to get word_cloud working on my machine I decided to use an online word cloud generator instead. Here’s the resulting word cloud:

Screen Shot 2016-02-23 at 6.58.51 PM

The technique I used to answer #2 was to get the list of similar artists for each artist I’ve seen live, remove artists that I’ve already seen, and keep track of how many times each unseen artist is listed as a similar artist. Here are the top recommendations generated by my algorithm (format: <artist, number of times listed as similar artist>):

  1. Swedish House Mafia, 5
  2. The Raconteurs, 4
  3. Cut Copy, 3
  4. Beach Fossils, 3
  5. Kaiser Chiefs, 3
  6. Iron Maiden, 3
  7. Dio, 3
  8. Ellie Goulding, 2
  9. Black Sabbath, 2 (seeing them in September)
  10. Animals as Leaders, 2

My recommendation algorithm is extremely simple but produced surprisingly good results.

The Echo Nest API is incredible.

P.S. I tried using pyechonest but there didn’t seem to be a way to retrieve artist genre information which is why I decided to use their API directly. 

Listen

Spotify’s year in music feature is brilliant. They took something simple, namely the play count for an artist/song/genre, and interpreted it through different time filters to create a a very fun product. I’m a fan of the design of that page, especially the colors.

Here are some of my statistics from 2015:

Spotify_yim_en-US_Q_xLs6.jpg
I thought this number would be higher.
Spotify_yim_en-US_lJ1ql2
No surprises here. I’ve seen 4/5 of these bands live!
Spotify_yim_en-US_qRkpVp
Again, not surprising given my top artists.
Spotify_yim_en-US_T7Zcp9
I LOVE this song. I still listen to it at least once a day. I even wrote a blog post about it.

What I’m currently listening to: Massive Attack and White Moth Black Butterfly

Massive Attack’s newest album Ritual Spirit came out recently and it is full of gorgeous tunes.

White Moth Black Butterfly is the side project of Daniel Tompkins, one of my favorite vocalists. His voice is astounding and never ceases to amaze me.