music

I am a runner but also a Body Pump enthusiast. Body Pump is a group fitness class of the Les Mills company, in which you train different muscle groups using a weighted bar – whose total weight you modulate with plates in order to adapt it to your fitness level and to the muscle group. Like R, Body Pump was created in New Zealand, what a wonderful country! Every three months, a new class is released, with new songs and choreographies. What doesn’t change is the muscle group trained in each of the 10 songs of each class.

I’ve thought of analysing Body Pump data for a long time now but could never find what I was looking for, which was a dataset of number of “reps” by song, e.g. how many squats do you do in each squats song. Then I realized I could also play with other data, like a quite comprehensive list of songs used in releases. I decided to cross this information with information about style of the corresponding artist in Spotify. Here is what I came up with!

Last week I published a post about scraping Radio Swiss Classic program. After that, Bob Rudis wrote an extremely useful post improving my code a lot and teaching me cool stuff. I don’t know why I forgot to add pauses between requests… Really bad behaviour! I will use his code today for re-scraping the data.

Why re-scrape the data? I mentioned broken links in my post. In fact, each time I hit a broken page, Radio Swiss Classic webmaster received an email. That person received a lot of emails because of me. They repaired the bug explaining these broken pages and contacted me because someone had turned me in (I feel super famous or spied on now), very kindly mentioning they had fixed all pages, and not holding any grudge against me. So let’s scrape everything again!

I am not a classical music expert at all, but I happen to have friends who are, and am even married to someone who plays the cello (and the ukulele!). I appreciate listening to such music from time to time, in particular Baroque music. A friend made me discover Radio Swiss classic, an online radio playing classical music all day and all night long, with a quite nice variety, and very little speaking between pieces, with no ads (thank you, funders of the radio!). Besides, the voices telling me which piece has just been played are really soothing, so Radio Swiss classic is a good one in my opinion.

Today, instead of anxiously waiting for the results of the French presidential elections, I decided to download the program of the radio in the last years and have a quick look at it, since after all, the website says that the radio aims at relaxing people.