Top 10 Voted Songs
- Track 25: Jaat Kahan Ho
- Track 18: Fifth Symphony (First Movement)
- Track 23: Wedding song
- Track 3: Percussion (Senegal)
- Track 14: Melancholy Blues
- Track 24: Flowing Streams
- Track 1: Brandenburg Concerto (First Movement)
- Track 7: Johnny B. Goode
- Track 20: Night Chant
- Track 9: Tsuru No Sugomori (Crane’s Nest)
After running the results through Palladio, I was at first intimidated by the amount of bubbles and the lack of information I can gather just by looking at the visualization of the data. Upon further tinkering, I was able to use different facet dimensions to start making meaning out of the data. I was able to pick out the top 10 most selected songs from our cohort (listed at the top). On top of that, I was able to track how many other people picked the 10 pieces I did on the survey. There were six “communities” that were generated by Palladio. Every member of our cohort belonged to either one or multiple of these “communities”. These “communities” showed people that chose the same songs and also made connections to other songs and other people. Unfortunately I was unable to draw any conclusions to the reason of song choices of people from different “communities”. The visualization of the bubbles did not contain enough information regarding the reasoning of each person’s choice.
By looking at the top 10 songs picked by our cohort, we can see that all of those songs had at least 45% of the class votes. Everybody in the class had their own criteria and considerations when selecting their top 10 songs. With the data presented in this visual format, it is difficult to pin point the reasons why everyone chose the songs that they did. On top of that, it’s equally difficult to uncover the reason for “null” choices without knowing the people or have a written explanation. However, by examining the songs themselves, a few assumptions could be made regarding people’s choices.
Familiarity
In the top 10 songs of our cohort, there is a song by Chuck Berry and a song by Louis Armstrong. Both of them are royalty of the blues and jazz genre. People could’ve selected these 2 songs based on recognizing their names and also the songs themselves as they are commonly covered by other musicians. Here are links of all the covers for Melancholy Blues and Johnny B. Goode. In the top 10 songs, there were also a couple classical pieces such as Fifth Symphony and Brandenburg Concerto (First Movement) composed by Beethoven and Bach. Not only are the composers’ names recognizable but classical pieces like the Fifth Symphony are often used in media such as movies and TV shows.
Region
One of my criteria for selecting the top 10 songs to include on the Golden Record was music that represent as much of our world as possible. This involved choosing songs from different geographic regions with different cultural backgrounds. Looking at the top 10 songs from the results, almost all of them are from different parts of the world, the exception being Beethoven and Bach both being from Germany, and Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong both being Americans. All the other top 10 songs represent different parts of earth and uses different languages and instruments that are native to that region.
In conclusion, although visual linking of data can be helpful to see connections, it is difficult to draw conclusions and know the reasoning for the data by visuals alone. Information about the person and their criteria is needed to interpret the data fully.