A lot of the music related InfoGraphics we post here are enlightening, though whimsical. Light in tone, they help put some element of music just a bit easier to grasp through drawings, colors, charts and text. Some, however, can be downright academic exercises in complex data analysis and visual thinking. Such is the case with Visualizing A Hit -- a by project Rutgers graduate students Shaun Ellis and Tom Engelhardt.
Their site allows you do download the data sets and even manipulate the visualizations to your liking. Using a domain of Billboard data of hit songs from 1960 to 2010, their visuals allow a user to explore this information by such factors as Danceability, Duration and Energy.
Here's the presentation Shaun and Tom use to introduce their work.
And some examples of some of the graphs that they have plotted this data into.
Did they prove anything? They have some interesting hypotheses about media consolidation and song staying power starting in the nineties.
