Eurovision Song Contest and GDP

Following up on my previous post and the one before that, here is some more analysis of Eurovision Song Contest voting for this year. There are some interesting correlations between national tele-votes (not jury votes) and demographic variables, especially per capita GDP. As the map above shows, this is essentially a proxy for the northwest–southeast axis.

Iceland came 4^th with the song 10 Years in spite of never actually competing; a positive COVID-19 test result restricted the band to their hotel; and they were judged based on a tape of their rehearsal performance. The richer Nordic countries seem to have been especially generous in this situation (see chart below).

Conversely, the winning song from Italy received generally lower tele-votes from the richer countries (I am not entirely sure why):

The song Je me casse from Malta came 7^th overall. As with Iceland, the higher tele-votes came from the richer countries, although the pattern here is fuzzier than for Iceland. There are also some notable outliers: the Australian tele-vote of 8 for Malta probably reflects the 176,000 people of Maltese descent living in Australia.

Russia shows a pattern somewhat similar to Italy (p < 0.004, R² = 22%), but this is simply because the former Soviet countries that vote for Russia are also the poorer ones. A better predictor can be obtained by counting Russian expatriates (p < 0.001, R² = 44%).

And finally, here is a plot of tele-vote totals against jury vote totals. They differ substantially:

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Eurovision Song Contest: More Analysis

Following up on my previous post, here is some more analysis of Eurovision Song Contest voting for this year. The maps above show a hierarchical clustering analysis on tele-voting (above) and jury voting (below), based on calculating simple Euclidean distance between vote vectors and on an assumption that countries would give themselves 12 points if they could. Some key differences between the four main clusters are highlighted in colour (note that Azerbaijan, Israel, the Netherlands, and the UK clustered alone or in a pair):

Tele-voting cluster 1 (green)

Countries: Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Ukraine.

Average votes:  Italy:  8, Iceland:  8, Ukraine:  8, Finland:  8, Lithuania:  8, France:  6, Switzerland:  4, Sweden:  4, Norway:  4, Malta:  2, Russia:  2, Serbia:  1, Belgium:  1, Albania:  1, Germany:  1, Greece:  0, Cyprus:  0, and Moldova:  0.

Tele-voting cluster 2 (purple)

Countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland.

Average votes:  Italy:  10, Serbia:  10, France:  8, Switzerland:  6, Ukraine:  6, Finland:  5, Iceland:  4, Russia:  2, Bulgaria:  2, Greece:  2, Azerbaijan:  2, Albania:  2, Spain:  2, Malta:  1, Lithuania:  1, Portugal:  1, Cyprus:  1, and Moldova:  0.

Tele-voting cluster 3 (red)

Countries: Albania, Czech Republic, France, Moldova, Portugal, and Romania.

Average votes:  Moldova:  10, Ukraine:  9, Italy:  8, France:  8, Switzerland:  6, Finland:  4, Greece:  4, Russia:  3, Portugal:  3, Iceland:  2, Sweden:  2, Albania:  2, Lithuania:  1, Bulgaria:  1, Israel:  1, Azerbaijan:  1, Serbia:  0, and Cyprus:  0.

Tele-voting cluster 4 (yellow)

Countries: Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Russia, and San Marino.

Average votes:  Italy:  10, Greece:  9, Cyprus:  9, France:  7, Ukraine:  6, Finland:  4, Russia:  4, San Marino:  4, Lithuania:  3, Switzerland:  2, Bulgaria:  2, Moldova:  2, Azerbaijan:  2, Malta:  1, Albania:  1, Iceland:  0, and Serbia:  0.

Check out the disputed songs: Iceland: 10 Years, Lithuania: Discoteque, Serbia: Loco Loco, Moldova: Sugar, Greece: Last Dance, and Cyprus: El diablo.

The map below shows jury voting. For jury voting, there were only two substantial clusters (i.e. containing 4 or more countries – Albania, Malta, Romania, France, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and Italy clustered alone or in small clusters of 2 or 3 countries).

Jury voting cluster 1 (purple)

Countries: Australia, Austria, Croatia, Czech, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, NM, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, and UK.

Average votes:  Switzerland:  9, Iceland:  8, France:  7, Italy:  6, Malta:  4, Bulgaria:  4, Portugal:  4, Ukraine:  3, Finland:  3, Lithuania:  2, Russia:  2, Israel:  2, Belgium:  2, Greece:  1, Sweden:  1, Serbia:  1, Cyprus:  1, Azerbaijan:  1, San Marino:  1, Netherlands:  1, Spain:  1, Germany:  1, UK:  1, and Moldova:  0.

Jury voting cluster 2 (red)

Countries: Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Moldova, Russia, and San Marino.

Average votes:  Greece:  9, Moldova:  8, Malta:  7, Bulgaria:  7, Italy:  6, France:  6, Russia:  6, Cyprus:  4, Azerbaijan:  4, San Marino:  3, Portugal:  2, Belgium:  2, Switzerland:  1, Iceland:  1, Ukraine:  1, Finland:  1, Lithuania:  1, Sweden:  1, Israel:  1, and Spain:  1.

Check out the disputed songs: Switzerland: Tout l’Univers, Iceland: 10 Years, Greece: Last Dance, and Moldova: Sugar

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Eurovision Song Contest 2021

The Eurovision Song Contest has been on again (strangely, Australia is now part of Europe). On the whole, I didn’t think much of the songs this year, although there were a few gems (like the French entry).

This (revised) chart shows those tele-votes which were surprisingly high, given the total scores (country colours indicate total scores, with grey for non-finalists). Arrows reflect high tele-votes (in a relative sense). Red arrows reflect particularly high tele-votes (in a relative sense), including:

• Austria, Croatia, North Macedonia (NM), Slovenia, and Switzerland ⟶ Serbia (Balkan cluster)
• North Macedonia (NM) and Italy ⟶ Albania (ditto)
• Cyprus ⟶ Greece ⟶ Cyprus (as usual)
• Netherlands ⟶ Greece (the Greek singer resides in the Netherlands)
• Georgia ⟶ Greece
• Russia ⟶ Cyprus
• Moldova ⟶ Russia (former USSR)
• Czech Republic and Romania ⟶ Moldova
• Latvia, Germany, Norway, UK, and Ireland ⟶ Lithuania
• Denmark and Iceland ⟶ Sweden (Nordic cluster)
• Sweden, Iceland, and Estonia ⟶ Finland (ditto)
• Malta ⟶ Norway
• Azerbaijan ⟶ Israel

Regional sentiment and expatriate voting still play a part, I see. Here is the same network overlaid on a map:

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The Circle of Fifths

I have often tried to visualise the circle of fifths in a way that makes sense both musically and mathematically. Above (click to zoom) is my latest attempt.

There are 12 notes in an octave (7 white piano keys and 5 black piano keys), and the diagram shows these 12 piano keys wrapped into a circle. A fifth is a step of 7 semitones (7 piano keys, counting black ones, e.g. C→D♭→D→E♭→E→F→F♯→G). The coloured spiral in the chart shows the “circle of fifths” resulting from moving up a fifth 12 times (moving left to right, and hence moving anticlockwise).

The reason that this works is that 7 and 12 have no common factor – and therefore the first multiple of 7 that is also a multiple of 12 is 7 × 12. Therefore every time you move up a fifth you get a different note, returning to the starting note only when you have moved up 12 times. In the process, you have hit every other note exactly once.

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The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out

Underneath (or, perhaps, to the side of) adult culture sits an often poorly documented culture for children alone. There are, of course, many songs and stories directed by adults to children, but true child culture consists of games, riddles, songs, stories, and rules directed from children to other children.

A rather dark example, largely specific to North America, is the Hearse Song below (the video gives a more complete version, but I must warn my readers – it’s really very gross, and not at all suitable for adults):

“Don’t ever laugh as a hearse goes by
For you may be the next to die
They wrap you up in a big white sheet
From your head down to your feet
They put you in a big black box
And cover you up with dirt and rocks …
And the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
The worms play pinochle on your snout …”

The song is essentially a form of gallows humour picked up by children at around age 10 – about the age that children first come to grips with the inevitably of death (although it is rather surprising, given that the US is a majority-Christian society, that Christian views of death barely appear in the song at all). The excellent article on the song by Charles Doyle also reports military versions of the song from World War I recorded by Carl Sandburg and John J. Niles, but those appear to draw on earlier childhood versions.

I’ve been experimenting with a textual analysis focussing on song snippets containing lines devoted to interment (2 to 6 lines, depending on the version). I compared versions with a variation of the Levenshtein distance at the word level, using a table of related words, and allowing for permuted lines. The multi-dimensional scaling diagram below collapses the calculated distances into two dimensions. The phrase “Doyle var” refers to variants listed by Doyle (e.g. “They put you in a big white shirt / And cover you up with rocks and dirt”), whereas “Alternate” refers to versions I have collected myself on the Internet (e.g. “They wrap you up in a bloody black sheet / And throw you down a thousand feet”). A large amount of mishearing and misremembering seems to be going on.

The numbers in brackets on the chart indicate the number of lines in each snippet. The 2-line child versions form a visible cluster in the diagram, with 4-line versions by modern bands (Harp Twins and Rusty Cage) a little more distant, and the World War I versions on the periphery all quite different:

Distances can also be visualised as an UPGMA tree. However, this cannot really be interpreted as an evolutionary tree, in that the 4-line band versions seem to be combining lines from multiple 2-line versions. Indeed, there seems to be a large pool of rhyming pairs within the culture that is assembled and reassembled in various ways, rather than any canonical song. Perhaps this reflects the character of the verbally innovative child culture in which the song (or, rather, song family) dwells.

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Eurovision!

The 2019 Eurovision Song Contest is on right now. Above (click to zoom) is a combined word cloud for the songs (or English translations of the songs).

From the point of view of getting into the final, it seems to be bad to sing about Heaven (Montenegro, Portugal), war (Croatia, Finland), cell phones (Belgium, Portugal), or cold (Latvia, Poland, Romania). On the other hand, it’s good to sing about lights (Germany, Norway, Sweden).

Good luck to everyone for the final!

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Eurovision Song Contest 2018

The Eurovision Song Contest has been on again (strangely, Australia has now become part of Europe). On the whole, I didn’t think much of the songs this year, although Ieva Zasimauskaite from Lithuania did sing an interesting song about love and marriage:

As usual, the voting is the really interesting aspect. This year, I’ve done an analysis where:

• I looked at combined country votes in the final (jury plus televoting)
• I assumed that countries would have given themselves the maximum score of 24

The diagram below shows a “cultural map” of Europe produced by multi-dimensional scaling of the votes by each country. That is, countries with similar tastes are located close to each other.

For example, Germany and the Netherlands have similar tastes. They both gave 6 or more points to Germany, Israel, Cyprus, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic. They both gave at most 2 points to Moldova, Albania, France, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia, Finland, Slovenia, Hungary, Portugal, and the UK. They differed on the remaining seven countries.

Colouring in the diagram is by the second principal component of the voting, which defines a cultural north-south axis.

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Looking back: 1982

In 1982 (35 years ago!) I finished my basic undergraduate degree, majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science (after sniffing around the job market, I continued my studies for an honours year). This was the year that the compact disc and the Commodore 64 computer came out:

Also that year, Stephen Cook won the Turing award for his work on computational complexity theory. The then Soviet Union landed two spacecraft in the hellish inferno that is Venus, and took photographs:

It was also a year of conflict – Argentina started a war with the UK over the Falklands Islands, and Israel invaded Lebanon. On a more positive note, there were several movies which became cult classics, such as Tron, E.T., and Conan the Barbarian. The superb science fiction movie Blade Runner stood out from the crowd (even with the flaws in the original cinema release):

In literature, Isabel Allende published her debut novel, as did Kazuo Ishiguro. In music, The Alan Parsons Project released their album Eye in the Sky and Australian band Icehouse (originally Flowers) released their classic single “Great Southern Land”:

Overall, it was a great year (apart from the wars).

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The Trivium and the Quadrivium

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Looking back: 1978

In 1978 I started senior high school (year 11 and 12). That was a year of terrorism – a bomb was exploded outside the Sydney Hilton Hotel by the Ananda Marga group (apparently in an attempt to kill Indian prime minister Morarji Desai), and former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro (below) was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades. On a more positive note, John Paul II became the first Polish pope, and helped to chip away at the power of the Soviet Union.

That year also marked the debut of the soap opera Dallas and the comic strip Garfield. In science, James Christy at the United States Naval Observatory discovered Pluto’s moon Charon. We finally got a good look at it in 2015:

In computing, the Turing Award went to Robert Floyd, for his work in programming languages and algorithms. Intel introduced the 8086, the first of the x86 microprocessors which are still the most common CPUs in personal computers and laptops today. The game Space Invaders also had its debut:

The year 1978 also saw the release of the unsatisfactory animated version of The Lord of the Rings, and a number of interesting albums, including The Kick Inside by Kate Bush, Pyramid by The Alan Parsons Project, Dire Straits by the band of the same name, the electronic Équinoxe by Jean Michel Jarre, and Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds:

Of the books published that year, The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, the exceedingly dark The House of God by Samuel Shem, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle (below) stand out.

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