Using Data to Find the Most Accessible Death Grips Song
Death Grips is an experimental hip hop band that has been releasing innovative, interesting, and, most notably, abrasive music since 2011.
The abrasiveness of Death Grips’ sound — exemplified by unique samples, distorted synthesizers, and nearly unintelligible scream-rapping — often leads to first-time listeners shutting off a Death Grips song during an initial listen.
Despite many people having an aurally traumatic introduction to Death Grips’ music, the stories of Death Grips’ critical acclaim often lead those same listeners to return to Death Grips’ music at a later time — and the listeners typically enjoy their experiences significantly more with each progressive listening attempt.
And while it’s commonplace for Death Grips fans to require multiple listening attempts to finally “get” Death Grips’ music — what if we can create a more targeted approach to enjoying Death Grips?
Instead of having new listeners’ introduction to Death Grips be turning on random or popular Death Grips songs — songs that may be difficult to listen to without having listened to Death Grips before— what if we can use data to find the most accessible Death Grips songs, allowing listeners to have the greatest chance at enjoying Death Grips with their first listening attempts?
What makes a song accessible?
In order to find Death Grips’ most accessible song, it’s important to define what “accessibility” is in this case.
I consider a song to be accessible if someone who is unfamiliar with that song can enjoy it within their first few attempts at listening to it. In other words, listening to an accessible song should limit the amount of discomfort a person feels while listening to that song while maximizing personal enjoyment.
What drives a song to be accessible for someone? Chances are, if a song is accessible for a person, the song sounds somewhat similar to the music with which that person is familiar.
So, if that person typically listens to mainstream pop, an accessible song for that person will sound somewhat similar to mainstream pop. Similarly, if that person typically listens to mainstream hip hop, an accessible song for that person will sound like mainstream hip hop.
Now, I think that the extent to which a song is similar to the music with which someone is familiar can be a suitable definition for the accessibility of a song.
However, if someone wants to “get into” an artist’s music, I think it’s important to listen to songs that are similar to the music with which someone is familiar given that those songs are representative of that artist’s music.
What does that even mean?
Well, let’s imagine that I’m trying to “get into” The Beatles’ music. The Beatles, if you’re unfamiliar, have had a multitude of musical phases in their career, and many of their songs sound like no other songs in their discography. If I tend to listen to avant-garde music, a song like “Revolution 9” would probably be the most accessible Beatles song for me. However, “Revolution 9” is such a unique song in The Beatles’ discography, and, in my opinion, it isn’t representative of The Beatles’ sound much at all. Listening to “Revolution 9” could be great for providing me with avant-garde music to listen to, but it may not help me “get into” The Beatles’ music, as “Revolution 9” is so dissimilar from the rest of The Beatles’ discography.
To summarize, I think the most accessible Death Grips songs are songs that sound the similar to the music with which someone is familiar (whatever that music may be), but, in my opinion, that similarity matters significantly more when those Death Grips songs are fairly representative of Death Grips’ overall sound.
Analysis
In this analysis, I used Spotify audio data retrieved through spotifyr, a fantastic R package created by Charlie Thompson.
Spotify audio data contains multiple variables to describe a song’s sound. The variables that I used for this analysis include:
- Valence (the positivity/negativity of a song’s sound)
- Danceability (the extent to which a song is suitable for dancing based on its rhythm and tempo)
- Energy (the intensity of a song’s sound)
- Instrumentalness (the likelihood that a track contains no vocals)
- Tempo (the estimated beats per minute of a song)
- Loudness (the loudness of a song, measured in decibels)
- Speechiness (the extent to which a song contains spoken words)
- Acousticness (the likelihood that a song is acoustic)
You can read more about the audio features here.
Also, in this analysis, I included every Death Grips song on Spotify. That includes projects such as Interview 2016 and Fashion Week as well as each of Death Grips’ studio albums. However, this excludes all of Exmilitary (besides “Guillotine”) and Death Grips (EP) (besides “Full Moon (Death Classic)”), as neither Exmilitary nor Death Grips (EP) is on Spotify.
Similarity and Distance
Overall, the goal with this analysis is to find:
- How similar each Death Grips song is to the “general” sound for any particular genre with which a person may be familiar (mainstream pop, mainstream hip hop, etc.)
- How “representative” a Death Grips song is in terms of Death Grips’ overall sound
To do this, we first need to define similarity. In this situation, I consider similarity to be the extent to which songs’ audio features are similar to each other. In other words, the most similar songs will have the smallest distance between their respective audio features.
We can measure the distance between songs’ audio features by using the Euclidean distance formula.
The formula looks like this: (where p and q are different songs, and the subscript numbers (1, 2, …, n) are different audio features)
Note that, in this analysis, I standardized all of Spotify’s audio features so that they all had a mean value of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. This way, each audio feature is weighted equally in calculating distances.
Centroids
A centroid is the geometric center of an object. In this situation, a centroid is a way to say “this is what the average ___(insert genre)___ song sounds like”.
This is useful, as we can calculate the centroids for different genres’ sounds — as well as Death Grips’ sound — to find both how similar each Death Grips song is to some particular genre and how representative each Death Grips song is of Death Grips’ overall sound.
To find the centroid for some object (in this case, a genre of music or Death Grips’ Spotify discography), we can calculate the arithmetic mean of each audio feature for all of the songs in that genre that are specified.
For example, the centroid of Spotify’s Global Top 50 playlist is a danceability rating of 0.75, an energy rating of -0.07, and a valence rating of 0.08. So, of the 50 songs in Spotify’s Global Top 50, the mean danceability rating is 0.75; the mean energy rating is -0.07; the mean valence rating is 0.08.
In contrast, the centroid of Death Grips’ music on Spotify is a danceability rating of -0.44, an rating of energy of 0.80, and a valence rating of -0.52.
Using these centroids, we can then calculate how similar each Death Grips song is to the “average” sound for any particular genre with which a person is familiar, and we can also calculate how representative a Death Grips song is in terms of Death Grips’ overall sound.
Putting it all Together
We now have, more or less, a 3-step process to calculate how accessible each Death Grips song is.
To calculate how similar a Death Grips song is to a genre with which someone may be familiar, we can calculate the distance between that Death Grips song’s audio features and the centroid for that genre.
I’ll call this metric “familiarity”, and I’ll re-scale it so that the song most similar to mainstream pop/mainstream hip hop/any genre is 100, and the song that is the most different least similar to mainstream pop/mainstream hip hop/any genre is 0.
To calculate how similar a Death Grips song is to the overall Death Grips sound, we can calculate the distance between that Death Grips song’s audio features and the centroid for Death Grips songs on Spotify.
I’ll call this metric “representativeness”, and I’ll re-scale it so that the song that is the most representative of Death Grips’ sound is 100, and the song that is the least representative of Death Grips’ sound is 0.
Finally, putting these two metrics together, we can calculate the arithmetic mean of these two metrics to find how accessible each Death Grips song is in terms of mainstream pop/mainstream hip hop/any genre of our choosing.
I’ll call this metric “accessibility”, and I’ll also re-scale it so that the song that is the most accessible is 100, and the song that is the least accessible is 0.
So, that was a lot of talking.
What Death Grips song is the most accessible to someone who’s music-listening background is in mainstream pop?
Drum roll, please.
…
…
And the winner is: “Hacker” from The Money Store.
“Hacker” ranks 3rd in terms of similarity to the “Global Top 50” playlist (familiarity), while ranking 6th in terms of Death Grips representativeness, leading to its ranking 1st in overall accessibility.
“Bitch Please” — 2nd in overall mainstream pop accessibility — ranked 10th in familiarity and 1st in representativeness.
In terms of albums, The Money Store, No Love Deep Web, and The Powers That B lead the way in mainstream pop accessibility.
Now what about mainstream hip hop?
And what about contemporary metal?
And what about mainstream electronic?
And, lastly, what about classic rock?
The End
Anyways, that’s it from me.
Here’s a Google Sheet with all of the accessibility data.
Here’s the code that I used for this analysis.
Also, if you haven’t already read it, you might enjoy my last article “Using Data to Find the Angriest Death Grips Song”.
Feel free to drop me a line on Twitter (@OppenheimerEvan) or by email (eoppe1022@gmail.com).
I want to thank a few people for their support in this project — Charlie Thompson, Daniel Rosenfeld, James O’Connell, Matt Kmiecik, John Malloy, Tanner Olsen, and Colin Cudmore.
