A few weeks ago saw the final of the tenth series of The Voice UK – a reality TV singing competition. The first stage of The Voice consists of blind auditions, where contestants sing, unseen by the four coaches whose chairs face away from the stage. If a coach likes what they hear, they press a button to turn around. If more than one coach turns, the contestant chooses which team to join. The blind auditions finish when each coach has a team of ten. Subsequent rounds reduce the field until four remain for the final, with the winner chosen by public vote. This article looks at the blind audition rounds over the ten series.
Continue reading →Author: Andrew Gustar
Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 9 – Advertising and Reviews
This final article in the series looking at the Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800 dataset considers the characteristics of the information that is the source of the data on most of the concerts – the advertisements in the daily press.
Continue reading →The Impact of Covid-19 on Concerts in England
This article uses data from concert-diary to analyse the impact of this year’s Covid-19 restrictions on classical concert activity in England. The website concert-diary.com is a listing of (mainly classical) concerts, primarily in the UK. Any concert promoter is able to submit details of their events, so, whilst not covering all UK concert activity, the listings include a wide range of small and large concerts, in various formats and genres, from across the country. Historical data on the site goes back to the year 2000.
Continue reading →Christmas Quiz: Name that Carol!
Here is a short festive quiz based on the lyrics of the top 30 carols on the carols.org.uk website. The challenge is to identify the carol from words that appear only in the lyrics of that carol and no other. So “merrily”, for example, only appears in one carol (clue: Ding Dong). It is just for fun – there is no prize other than a smug feeling and whatever you decide to reward yourself with!
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 8 – Performers
The previous article in this series looked at the composers featuring in eighteenth century London concerts. Also encoded within the “programme” field of the dataset is information on the performers at the concerts, and they are the subject of this article.
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 7 – Composers
This article in the series covering the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset looks at composers. As previously discussed, composers can be identified as the names preceding a “Genre” code in the list of entries in the dataset’s “Programme” field. In most cases they can also be associated with the genre of the work in question (and sometimes the precise work can be identified, although this information is quite patchy).
Continue reading →Power Laws in Opera
A recent addition to the Concert Datasets page is Operabase, a database of over 500,000 opera performances worldwide since 2004. I plan to look at this data more closely in a future article, but for now, I thought it would be interesting to see if opera performances follow a power law.1
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 6 – Repertoire
This article looks at the types of repertoire included in eighteenth-century London concerts. As discussed in the first article of this series, information on the works performed is encoded, in a complicated way, in the “programme” field of the dataset.
The data is based on concert advertisements in newspapers, so there is considerable variation in the detail provided. Some advertisements spell out details of all of the works and who will perform them, but it is more typical for the focus to be on the performers, with the works often vaguely specified, such as “a concerto by Handel” (if you are lucky, it will say what instrument it is for).
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 5 – The Concert Season
This article in the series exploring the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset looks at when the concerts were held. This covers questions such as in which decade or year they took place, at what point during the year, on which days of the week, and at what times of day? And how did this vary according to the type of concert?
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 4 – Ticket Prices
In this article about the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset, I will look in more detail at the prices of concert tickets.
The published data has multiple prices and categories listed in single cells of the spreadsheet. This needs to be parsed before it can be used for statistical analysis.
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