Statistics students of Ellen Greenberg and Emily Landes, instructors in mathematics, statistics, and computer science, submitted entries to the American Statistical Association Data Visualization Competition, and—for the second year in a row!—an Andover student took first place.
Congratulations to Rudd Fawcett ’18 for winning with his poster “Charting Chart Toppers.” Fawcett’s AP Statistics poster project set out to explore whether music streaming has changed the compositional homogeneity of the Hot 100. Rudd created scripts in Python to analyze 50 years of data from Spotify and the Billboard Hot 100 to determine how many songs reached #1 and how long most streaks lasted. Fawcett concluded, “based on this primitive analysis and exploration of Spotify and Hot 100 data, it would appear that the introduction of a streaming service has little impact on the musical composition of songs that appear in the Hot 100 over the past 50 years. At least through key signature, modality, tempo, and valence, that is.”
From the Andover Gazette published on May 25, 2018
