POPULAR MUSIC AND LOVE

For decades, in Western popular music, the theme of love had been prevalent in thousands of popular tracks, hundreds of which had made it to the highest positions of the most influential music charts. The aim of the project is to explore the question as to why that is the case? How is it that this theme particularly sticks out in Western popular music? How did the theme change over time? Is it only a specific part of the theme of love that proves to be more successful (such as romantic love) or do tracks about love for a place or activity, or perhaps hate also have a place? Throughout the project, which spans from the 1960s to today, these are the questions which the group will be asking.

Group Communication and Role Assignment

For this upcoming project, our group has decided that the most optimal way of communication would be to create a WhatsApp group as each member had access.

In terms of role assignment, the group has agreed that it should be a collective responsibility to collect research material such as data sets for the project.

Data Sets

We have decided that in order to gain a large sample of music would be to utilise the charts which are available publicly such as the Billboard 100 and the UK Top 40. This would give us a large base of data.

An issue that was initially realised was that it would require a HUGE amount of data to cover 60 years of music charts, and hence we had decided to limit it to 15 year periods where we would collect data from 2025, 2010, 1995, 1980 and 1965 to create a continuity, while still covering a large span of time, opening up points of discussion about the evolution of the expression of love in the charts, but also to develop our data based on events which were happening at the time that could suggest why love songs had a particular rise or fall in a certain period.

Some group members have already started creating some concepts for what the theme of our project will look like with collected data in terms of aesthetic.

Initial Research

Visualisation and Inspiration

Our group has considered multiple forms of what the visualisation of the project could look like. There is stil some key decisions to be made, however, the group has also narrowed down its design ideas to inspirations based around two differing methods of presenting data

We particularly found interest in the ISOTYPE style of presenting data, especially based around the works of Otto Neurath, utilising related imagery to represent statistics. Here are just a few examples of ISOTYPE charts

ISOTYPE ONE ISOTYPE TWO

Additionally we also found it interesting how data was presented in an example used in the workshop in the 'Deforestation' page (pictured below).

TREE RINGS

While not necessarily statistical, several journalistic pieces have caught interest in terms of the themes and potential topics of discussion which can be included alongside statistical data:

('Why People Keep On Writing Love Songs?' by Natalia Mendez and Darby Ottoson, The Current, 2023)

('Why are Pop Songs so Obssessed with Love?' by Oliver Picken, The Edge, 2022)

('What's With All The Songs About Love?' by Julia J. Hynek, The Harvard Crimson, 2024)