About This Project

An interactive exploration of AR Rahman's film discography, plus the album Vande Mataram — 291 albums (across multiple languages) and 2,116 tracks spanning 1992 to 2026, visualized through data. Browse sonic fingerprints, trace collaborator networks, and discover patterns across three decades of one of cinema's most inventive composers.

Built by Swaroop and Sharan, who also host Brothers in Music: The AR Rahman Edition — a podcast where two brothers explore Rahman's discography year by year.

The Podcast

View all 13 episodes

1. 1. 1992
2. 2. 1993
3. 3. 1994 (Part 1)
4. 4. 1994 (Part 2)
5. 5. 1995 (Part 1)
6. 6. 1995 (Part 2)
7. 7. 1996
8. 8. 1997 (Part 1)
9. 9. 1997 (Part 2)
10. 10. 1997: Vande Mataram
11. 11. 1998 (Part 1: Dil Se)
12. 12. 1998 (Part 2: 1947 Earth)
13. 13. 1999 (Part 1)

Data Sources

Track and film metadata was scraped from Wikipedia's discography pages for AR Rahman. This includes album names, track listings, singer credits, lyricist credits, director, cast, release year, and language. The catalogue covers Rahman's film soundtracks plus one non-film album, Vande Mataram (1997), added in October 2026; non-film albums carry no director or cast. Only songs Rahman composed are included: licensed tracks and other composers' songs that appear on some soundtracks are left out.

Audio features come from two sources:

• Spotify (via ReccoBeats) — provides danceability, energy, valence, acousticness, and tempo for tracks with a Spotify match (~43% of the catalog).
• Librosa (direct audio analysis) — computes rhythmic complexity, spectral features, and harmonic structure from the audio waveform (~92% of the catalog).

For tracks with Spotify data, we use Spotify's features directly. For tracks without, we estimate equivalent scores from librosa's audio analysis, using the ~860 tracks that have both sources as a calibration set. This gives us unified audio features for about nine in ten tracks. Coverage varies by album — the Data Quality page shows completeness for each one.

Audio Features Glossary

Each feature is a number between 0 and 1 (except tempo, which is in BPM before normalization). These are the six dimensions used across the site's radar charts and scatter plots.

• Energy — Perceptual intensity and activity. Energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and driven. A soft ghazal scores low; a high-octane dance number scores high.
• Microtonal Variation — How much a track uses pitches between the 12 standard Western notes. Higher values indicate more use of gamakas, shrutis, and bent notes — common in Carnatic- and Hindustani-inflected compositions. Derived from librosa's chroma and pitch analysis. Shown as a percentile within the song's decade: the raw measure falls over time (about 20 cents of average deviation in the early 1990s, 13 in the 2020s), partly a change in production and partly how older recordings measure, so each song is compared with its contemporaries rather than with the whole catalogue.
• Valence — Musical positivity. High valence = happy, cheerful, euphoric. Low valence = sad, melancholic, intense. Note: for tracks without Spotify data, valence is estimated and shown with reduced confidence.
• Acousticness — How acoustic (vs. electronic) a track sounds. 1.0 = high confidence the track is purely acoustic.
• Rhythmic Complexity — How layered and varied the rhythmic texture is. High scores indicate complex, shifting percussion patterns; low scores indicate a simple, steady beat. Derived from onset density and beat-tracking confidence.
• Tempo — The speed of the track in beats per minute, normalized to a 0–1 scale. Rahman's tracks range from ~46 to ~217 BPM.

What These Features Don't Measure

These six dimensions capture useful sonic properties, but they were designed for Western popular music and have real blind spots when applied to Rahman's work:

• Raga and tala structure — The melodic grammar of Carnatic and Hindustani music is not captured. A track rooted in Mohanam and one in Kalyani may score similarly on all six features despite being melodically distinct.
• Melodic contour and ornamentation — Gamakas, meends, and other ornamental techniques that define a vocalist's style are invisible to these features.
• Orchestral layering — Rahman's signature production — building from a single voice to a full arrangement — is not directly measured. Energy captures some of this, but not the texture.
• Cultural mood — Valence measures "positivity" by Western standards. A devotional track like Khwaja Mere Khwaja may score low on valence while being deeply uplifting in its spiritual context.

Limitations & Caveats

This project is a labor of love, not a peer-reviewed dataset. We've tried to be thorough, but there are real limitations you should know about:

• Not every track has audio features. About 6% of tracks have no audio data from either source. Spotify matching depends on regional availability; librosa requires finding the audio online. Coverage is weakest for early 90s Tamil films and obscure dubbed releases.
• Predicted features are approximate. For tracks with only librosa data, features like valence are estimated via regression (out-of-sample R² between 0.30 and 0.47) and carry lower confidence than direct Spotify measurements. Valence predictions are the least reliable.
• Wikipedia credits may be incomplete or wrong. Singer and lyricist credits are community-maintained and may have gaps, duplicates, or errors — especially for older or lesser-known albums. Some tracks list the composer as "singer" when the credit really refers to the score performer.
• Language labels have noise. Our scraper sometimes picked up Wikipedia section headers instead of actual languages. We've manually corrected hundreds of these, but some may remain.
• Duplicate tracks across languages. Many Rahman films were released in multiple languages (Tamil, Hindi, Telugu). The same song may appear twice or more with different titles and singers. We separate albums by language but the underlying composition is sometimes the same. However, star (actor/actress) collaborations on the Singer-Collaborators page are counted per film, not per language version.
• Album boundaries are fuzzy. Wikipedia's definition of an "album" varies: some pages list background score alongside songs, some split soundtracks from scores, and some Hindi dubbed releases share the original Tamil compositions. Our 291-album count reflects Wikipedia's structure, not a canonical discography.
• Audio features were designed for Western pop. Spotify's algorithms and librosa's defaults are trained on Western music. Features like valence and danceability may not translate perfectly to Carnatic-inflected, devotional, or folk compositions. Our "Microtonal Variation" feature is an attempt to address this gap, but it's an approximation.
• Album year, not film year. Where Wikipedia lists a soundtrack release date, "year" is the year the album came out, which can precede the film by a year (Bombay 1994, Rang De Basanti 2005, Guru 2006). Le Musk is dated by its 2024 soundtrack release.
• One non-film album. Vande Mataram (1997) has no director or cast; its Tamil track appears as a separate one-track album entry.

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