Joel Eastwood and Erik Hinton from The Wall Street Journal analyzed some of the rhyming patterns and lyrics from the recent Broadway hit, "Hamilton." Taking on creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's lyrics was no easy task. As Eastwood and Hinton state in their article, the musical has "some of the most densely packed, complex rhyming lyrics in the history of musicals." They created an algorithm and visualizations to help analyze some of the rhyming patterns and lyrics featured in the musical.
At first, the visualizations weren't exactly clear because I was trying to decipher what the different colour-codes meant and how they were actually analyzing and categorizing the rhymes. Reading the second article about the methodology behind creating the algorithm and the research they did helped clarify some of these things for me. The different lyric maps/visualizations and being able to play the sections of the songs being analyzed also made things clearer. Visually following how the different rhyming patterns play out in the songs was useful for interpreting and understanding the data and patterns.
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| Some notes on and an example from The Wall Street Journal article/data set. |
Being that this was a music and lyric-based visualization, having the data mapped out almost like a music sheet worked and was an interesting style choice. I don't think another chart or map style would have worked as well for what Eastwood and Hinton were trying to achieve with this particular data set.
Playing the song sections, clicking on each individual square, and clicking on the lyrics are the main interactive features for this visualization. As previously mentioned, playing sections of the songs being analyzed made things clearer and was a strong visual aid. However, it feels like being able to click on the individual squares or lyrics is not completely necessary or useful. These interactive features were all easy enough to use and decipher, but having all of the different interactive options seems to over-complicate things. Just having the song playing and the squares showing the rhyming patterns could be enough.
I definitely feel like this audio-visualization would be more visually understandable if it was designed like a literal music sheet, with vertical scrolling.
ReplyDeleteI also get the feeling that Eastwood and Hinton don't know much about poetry and lyricism, since none of the rhymes are perfect, nor are any of them end rhymes (of the examples given, of course).
Throughout the article, they break down different sets of lyrics and the different types of rhymes that are used in the musical. In the other article that goes into their methodology, the explain the amount of research they did on rhymes, language, and lyrics.
DeleteI have to agree with you that all the different interactive options are confusing, and can be a little overwhelming. I also feel like having the amount of colour choices without many instructions of using it can be confusing. But, overall, I think it was a good visualization to put all that information into.
ReplyDeleteI find that this particular visualization is very interesting and intriguing! However, for readers such as yourself and I, the visualization is most definitely confusing without having to read more information about the methodology as you have explained. This comes to say that the visualization may not stand on its own properly without the additional information.
ReplyDeleteThe concept is interesting, but it feels like the amount of time it would take me to figure it out does not equal how badly I want to know the different sound patterns. This graph feels like you need to have a degree in musical theory just to find anything out since there are just such a vast number of options and information given all at once.
ReplyDeleteClearly you have to know about music to understand the chart and it is very confusing, thank you for explaining the methodology. That amount of information could have been broken down in two or three charts maybe, too many colors and it all mixed together makes it hard to understand. Your analysis was well written and you explained well.
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