TikTok is arguably one of the largest cultural phenomenons of the decade. While initially released in 2016 as Douyin to mainland China, it was rebranded as TikTok in 2017 for international release. That being said, it didn't become available in the United States until it was merged with Musical.ly in August of 2018. (Mainland China still only has access to Douyin). Users share short video clips ranging from 3 to 60 seconds. They can use their recorded audio or replace it with songs and sounds available in the app. This project will be focusing on a few of these songs and trying to determine why these ones specifically got so popular.
Complimenting a musical analysis will be the audio analysis tool Cyanite, an artificial intelligence tool that can provide information like key and BPM (beats per minute), but more importantly mood information that it detects. Cyanite maps out this mood information in a polar chart showcasing the averages of each mood during a given song . It also provides the ability to overlay multiple song's polar charts for comparison purposes.
The purpose of this project is to try and discover trends and similarities between several TikTok hit songs by focusing on their musical characteristics. Why did these specific songs catch on and have trends formed around them? Do they happen to all just be good and catchy songs, or is there something else that ties them together?
Songs (Spotify Playlist):