If you’ve ever listened to Radiohead and thought to yourself, “Oh jeez, I do wish someone could quantify just how sad this song is making me feel,” your strange desire has been granted. Data scientist Charlie Thompson recently used the programming language R to find “a data-driven determination of [Radiohead’s] most depressing song.”
First, Thompson used Spotify’s API to pull track information for each song on Radiohead’s nine studio albums. One of Spotify’s available metrics is a song’s “valence,” which the company describes as “a measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track.” Radiohead’s “True Love Waits” and “We Suck Young Blood” both had the lowest valence score of 0.0378, making them the saddest songs according to Spotify.
via Engadget
