Evolution of
The Beatles became widely regarded as the foremost and most
influential act of the rock era. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock
and roll, the Beatles later experimented with several musical styles, ranging from pop ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and
hard rock, often incorporating classical elements and unconventional
recording techniques in innovative ways. In the early 1960s, their
enormous popularity first emerged as "Beatlemania", but as the group's
music grew in sophistication, led by primary songwriters Lennon and
McCartney, they came to be perceived as an embodiment of the ideals
shared by the counterculture of the 1960s. This work is an attempt to visualize their music, and its evolution over time.
Scroll down to explore.
The list of songs above are based off the data scraped from the Beatles' Wikipedia page.
Every song is represented by all the differet genres it is influenced from. The data for the genres for each song is derived from the information available on every song's wikipedia page. Data was scraped from 226 different web-pages, one for each song.
Most common genre influnces were grouped seperately and the less common genres were grouped under one category - 'others' and given a green color.
Every cell in the circular grid above represents one song, with its influnces.
The same sources were used to collect the song lengths, song writers, album names, US chart positions and data created, and the process was repeated for each of these variables.
As a future scope, I would like to include other variables that help in understanding the evolution of the Beatles' music. There is a list of all songs and their lyrics available on the web, which I would like to use to carry out a textual analysis to further understand the development of their music over their active years. Examples of such variables are - the number of unique words in each song, the number of times the term 'love' was used in their songs, number of repetitions, and the emotions behind the songs. I would also like to explore how the Beatles have evolved in their use of instruments and how this has impacted other aspects of their music. Currently, the filters applied above are exclusive to themselves. I would also like to add hierarchy to the structure to see if I can uncover new trends.