Tim Cowlishaw — The Secret Science of Pop

The Secret Science of Pop (2017)

Project with BBC R&D

Two people, a man and a woman, sat at a desk in front of a big screen with graphics on, in a situation that generally gives the impression that DATA IS BEING ANALYSED. one of the people is me.

I contributed to the BBC Four documentary The Secret Science of Pop, working with a team of experts from the BBC, Imperial College London, QMUL and Oxford University to analyse the history of recorded pop music, and investigate whether data science and machine learning techniques can predict what makes a song a hit – somewhat unsurprisingly, the results were inconclusive.