Tuesday, May 26th, 20264:00 pm – 4:45 pm ET
Presented by: Will Cipolli (Colgate University), Nicole Dalzell (Wake Forest University),Roy Bower (Furman University), Ciaran Evans (Wake Forest University)Co-hosted by: Johanna Hardin (Pomona College) and Ciaran Evans (Wake Forest University)
Abstract
In this May edition of the JSDSE/CAUSE webinar series, we discuss the recent article "Battle of the Bands: Trying to Identify Contributions to a Collaboration". This article creates and explores a dataset containing musical and lyrical features for tracks from three rock bands—Manchester Orchestra, The Front Bottoms, and All Get Out—all of whom contributed to a collaborative track, "Allentown." The authors use the goal of disentangling the different contributions to "Allentown" to motivate learning logistic and multinomial regression. Furthermore, collecting data about what each band sounds like (using Essentia) and what the lyrics of each band read like (using the Bing Lexicon and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software) provide opportunities for students to work with various technologies to collect and clean data, as well as create features from data. These data are approachable to students because of the context, and the overarching results match public comments about the collaboration, providing a real-world connection.
Article Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26939169.2025.2547611