TL;DR Could you please help me fill the table below with descriptive words for each of the spotify audio analysis features? (Fill and/or correct what is already there).
For a personal project, I'm trying to come up with words to describe songs that would fall at the extremes of the various spectrums of audio analysis provided by Spotify.
The provided features are as follows (source):
- acousticness: whether the track is acoustic
- danceability: describes how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity.
- energy: represents a perceptual measure of intensity and activity. Typically, energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and noisy. For example, death metal has high energy, while a Bach prelude scores low on the scale. Perceptual features contributing to this attribute include dynamic range, perceived loudness, timbre, onset rate, and general entropy.
- instrumentalness: Predicts whether a track contains no vocals. "Ooh" and "aah" sounds are treated as instrumental in this context. Rap or spoken word tracks are clearly "vocal".
- liveness: Detects the presence of an audience in the recording. Higher liveness values represent an increased probability that the track was performed live.
- speechiness: Speechiness detects the presence of spoken words in a track. Higher values represent talk show, audio book, poetry. Middle values include rap.
- valence: musical positiveness conveyed by a track.
For example, a song at either extremes of the "acousticness" spectrum would be
- high acousticness: an acoustic song
- low acousticness: a song with electric instruments; electronic music
I am looking for words that are for every feature what acoustic, electric, and electronic are for the "acousticness" feature.
So far, here's what I could come up with:
| low | feature | high |
|---|---|---|
| hectic | danceability | groovy / beats |
| chill / relaxing | energy | high-octane / caffeinated |
| electric / electronic | acousticness | acoustic |
| ?? | instrumentalness | instrumental |
| studio | liveness | live / concert |
| depressed / sad / angry | valence | euphoric / cheerful / happy |
| ?? | speechiness | rap / prose / spoken |
In particular, I'm having issues with the instrumentalness & speechiness axes, because they seem to both relate to the same thing (in my mind at least). Here are some examples:
- a track can be low in both. For example some RnB tracks where there is only a couple instruments, a kick and some claps (low instrumentalness) and the vocals are sung (low speechiness).
- a track can be high in both. For example some electronic music with a lot of different instruments (high instrumentalness), but the only vocals are a few "yeah", "dance" words here and there (high speechiness, apparently).
- a track can be low instrumentalness and high speechiness. For example some irish trad songs, or some poetry over simple electronic music.
- a track can be high instrumentalness and low speechiness. Basically music without human voice, typically orchestra or brass band.
