These days, it seems, you can’t attend a wedding without hearing the soft croon of Ed Sheeran at some point. It got me thinking, is there an archetype of wedding hits? Would sappy slow songs dominate the playlists?

看来，这些天来，您无法不听艾德·希兰(Ed Sheeran)的低调说话，就无法参加婚礼。 这让我开始思考，是否有婚礼喜剧的原型？ 慢节奏的歌曲会主导播放列表吗？

This gave me an idea for entering a local data storytelling challenge a while back. I would explore the profile of popular wedding songs in a data visualization.

这让我有了一个进入本地数据叙事挑战的想法。 我将在数据可视化中探索流行婚礼歌曲的配置文件。

集思广益 (Brainstorming)

There are several ways to visualize music, but I was rather inspired by Susie Wu’s film flowers and Amy Cesal and Zander Furnas’s wedding guest badges, which were in turn inspired by Georgia Lupi’s data portraits for 2017 TED Talk attendees. In their respective works, data points on a given subject were turned into a playful cocktail of shapes, colors, and symbols.

有几种方法可以使音乐形象化，但我的灵感却来自于Susie Wu的电影花以及Amy Cesal和Zander Furnas的婚礼宾客徽章 ，而这些徽章又受到Georgia Lupi的2017年TED Talk与会者的数据肖像的启发。 在他们各自的作品中，将给定主题上的数据点转换为形状，颜色和符号的嬉戏鸡尾酒。

I knew that the Spotify API provided information on a song’s audio features such as its duration, energy, and level of cheerfulness. Putting the two together, I decided to visualize individual songs as a combination of their respective features. Tackling how was left to a later stage.

我知道Spotify API提供了有关歌曲音频功能的信息，例如歌曲的持续时间，能量和愉悦程度。 将两者放在一起，我决定将每首歌曲的各自功能进行可视化。 应对如何留给后面的阶段。

明确目标 (Clarifying objectives)

Confession: I find it’s easy to get distracted or lost when working on an open-ended project like this. To help anchor the project, I came up with some key guiding questions. Contrary to how it may appear in this article, the process was not a linear one. Rather, I refined the questions as I poked around the data and designed some prototypes. These questions ended up being:

坦白：我发现在这样的开放式项目中工作很容易分心或迷路。 为了帮助完成该项目，我提出了一些关键指导问题。 与本文中的显示方式相反，该过程不是线性过程。 相反，我在查阅数据并设计一些原型时改进了问题。 这些问题最终是：

• Why do certain songs keep appearing on wedding playlists? This was the big, burning question that motivated the project in the first place.

  为什么某些歌曲继续出现在婚礼播放列表中？ 首先，这是一个巨大的，迫在眉睫的问题，它激发了该项目。

• What features do wedding songs tend to have in common? How do these differ from other popular songs? These were the supporting questions to guide the data exploration.

  婚礼歌曲有哪些共同点？ 这些与其他流行歌曲有何不同？ 这些是指导数据探索的支持性问题。

• What does our choice of music features ultimately say about us as humans? More specifically, how do we recreate memories or set the mood we want for weddings? These were the probing questions that reflected the takeaways I’m hoping to get at the end of the project.

  我们对音乐功能的选择最终会对我们作为人类产生什么影响？ 更具体地说，我们如何重现回忆或设定婚礼所需的心情？ 这些是探究性问题，反映了我希望在项目结束时获得的收获。

数据探索 (Data exploration)

Initially, I had the thought to compile my own list of wedding hits by scraping every Spotify playlist with “wedding” in the title and seeing which songs appeared most often. However, this approach proved to be rather cumbersome, so I turned to a shortcut: Spotify’s declaration of the 50 most popular wedding songs in the form of their own playlist, “Most Popular Wedding Songs Globally.”

最初，我想到了自己的婚礼歌曲列表，方法是在每个Spotify播放列表中以标题中的“ wedding”为标题，并查看出现频率最高的歌曲。 但是，这种方法非常麻烦，因此我转向了一条捷径：Spotify以自己的播放列表 “全球最受欢迎的婚礼歌曲”的形式宣布了50首最受欢迎的婚礼歌曲。

We often need to have a comparison or benchmark as a context to get a meaningful sense of the data. For example, what does it mean if a wedding hit has an energy score 0.6 out of 1.0? Is this typical of songs in general or just wedding songs? For comparison, I gathered songs from two other Spotify-curated playlists, the “Top Tracks of 2018” playlist for popular songs and the “Broken Heart” playlist for songs that I felt would be the polar opposite of wedding songs.

我们通常需要进行比较或基准测试，以获取有意义的数据含义。 例如，如果婚礼喜剧的能量得分为0.6(满分为1.0)，那意味着什么？ 这是一般歌曲还是婚礼歌曲中的典型歌曲？ 为了进行比较，我从另外两个Spotify策划的播放列表中收集了歌曲，流行歌曲的“ 2018年热门曲目” 播放列表和我认为与婚礼歌曲截然相反的歌曲的“破碎的心” 播放列表 。

For each feature (e.g. energy, mood, etc.), I charted the distribution of each group of songs. One thing that stood out was that while wedding hits in general tend to be more cheerful than heartbreak songs, two types of wedding hits were rather common: super upbeat songs and rather heart-rending ones. Also, it seems that while wedding hits tend to be more acoustic in nature than top tracks (which were mostly electronic dance music or hip-hop), they were less so than the heartbreak tracks. For those curious, Spotify’s glossary on the audio features is available here.

对于每种功能(例如，精力，情绪等)，我都绘制了每组歌曲的分布图。 突出的一件事是，虽然一般而言，结婚歌曲的流行性往往比令人心碎的歌曲更令人愉悦，但两种类型的结婚歌曲是相当普遍的：超级乐观的歌曲和令人心动的歌曲。 同样，看起来，尽管婚礼现场的流行歌曲在本质上倾向于比顶级曲目(大多是电子舞曲或嘻哈音乐)更具声学感，但它们却不如令人心碎的曲目。 对于那些好奇的人，可以在此处获得有关音频功能的Spotify词汇表。

In terms of genre, unsurprisingly, the popular wedding songs were more often pop or soul music. Spotify’s records of song genres were mostly missing so I got the data by web scraping Google’s featured snippets for genre search results. Not exactly a foolproof method, I know, but it sufficed for providing an overall sense.

就类型而言，毫无疑问，流行的婚礼歌曲更多是流行音乐或灵魂音乐。 Spotify的歌曲流派记录大部分都丢失了，因此我通过网络抓取Google针对流派搜索结果的精选片段获得了数据。 我知道，这并不是一种万无一失的方法，但足以提供整体感觉。

设计过程 (Design process)

As I was working with wedding hits, I thought it would be fun to represent the songs using favors commonly found at weddings.

当我处理婚礼热门歌曲时，我认为使用婚礼上常见的喜好来代表歌曲会很有趣。

The process of imagining and defining the visual concept started with rough sketches on paper. I found that cupcakes provided the sweet spot as a canvas that could accommodate a layering of design features without being too complex. Mapping the music features to cupcake decorations required further rounds of experimentation to see what worked and what didn’t.

构想和定义视觉概念的过程始于纸上的草图 。 我发现纸杯蛋糕可以作为画布的甜蜜点，它可以适应设计特征的层次而又不会太复杂。 将音乐功能映射到纸杯蛋糕装饰需要进一步的实验，以查看有效的方法和无效的方法。

While checking online on how I could automate design patterns based on numerical properties, I came across mosaic art and spirographs.

在网上检查如何根据数值属性自动执行设计模式时，我遇到了马赛克艺术和描记器。

Creating the desired spirographs took many iterations. Special shout-out to Joel Schneider’s awesome spiro package in R! Other aspects of the design were done directly in Inkscape, an open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator.

创建所需的呼吸记录仪需要进行多次迭代。 特别鸣叫Joel Schneider的R真棒螺包！ 设计的其他方面直接在Inkscape中完成，Inkscape是Adobe Illustrator的开源替代方案。

烤蛋糕 (Baked cupcakes)

I pulled everything together in an infographic for the data storytelling challenge. To my delight, my submission was awarded a commendation for its creativity and design.

我将所有内容整理在一个图表中，以应对数据讲故事的挑战。 令我高兴的是，我的作品因其创造力和设计而受到嘉奖 。

As shown in the infographic, it seems certain types of music do make popular wedding songs. Soulful, slow-tempo ballads (perfect for those reflective moments) occupied top positions in the ‘Most Popular Wedding Songs Globally’ playlist. High-energy music, which are great for dancing to, made it to the playlist as well. Looking at the song titles, it also appears that people tend to lean toward music that is overtly about romantic ideals. See “Marry You” by Bruno Mars or “Marry me” by Train for instance. However, the fact that “Hey Ya!” by Outkast—a deceptively depressing song about relationships— is also a wedding hit suggests that people pay more attention to the vibes in the music than the actual lyrics.

如图所示，似乎某些类型的音乐确实会制作流行的婚礼歌曲。 充满活力的慢节奏民谣(完美体现那些反光时刻)在“全球最受欢迎的婚庆歌曲”播放列表中排名第一。 非常适合跳舞的高能量音乐也进入了播放列表。 从歌曲标题看，人们似乎也倾向于偏爱浪漫理想的音乐。 见“嫁给你” 布鲁诺·马尔斯(Bruno Mars) 或例如通过火车“嫁给我”。 但是，事实是“嘿，呀！” Outkast创作的一首关于人际关系的令人沮丧的歌曲，也是婚礼的热门歌曲，这表明人们比实际歌词更关注音乐中的共鸣。

Looking back, there are definitely a few things I would have done differently. One is to make the interpretation of cupcake images more user-friendly, perhaps with smarter labeling or an easier legend.

回顾过去，我肯定会做一些不同的事情。 一种是使杯形蛋糕图像的解释更加人性化，也许使用更智能的标签或更简单的图例。

All in all, it has been a great hands-on learning journey!

总而言之，这是一次很棒的动手学习之旅！