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Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? (2017)
- timlod 8y agoThis is a cool analysis featuring an interesting metric (degree of compressibility) for measuring repetitiveness in song lyrics. Great graphics explaining the algorithm too! Spoiler: Lyrics do seem to get more repetitive.
- woliveirajr 8y agoDegree of compressibility is an interesting tool that serves many purposes. One that I like is Normalized compression Distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalized_compression_distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalized_compression_distanc... is a light starting point). With NCD you can measure, for example, how similar two lyrics are, or even group similar songs together.
- talltimtom 8y agoExtrapolating these trends would suggest that all popular songs will just be repetitions of single sentences in the year 2140.
- askvictor 8y agoSo you're saying that Daft Punk was 150 years ahead of its time?
- lake99 8y agoBut still centuries behind liturgical music. Sing "Kyrie eleison" in this manner for 5 minutes, and then sing "Kyrie eleison" in a different manner for 10 minutes. Sing "Christe eleison" in between for a few minutes. Let's end the day singing "Osanna in excelsis" in a couple of different ways, for a few minutes each.
- michaelt 8y ago$ echo "GlooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOoria" | wc --bytes 35 $ echo "GlooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOoria" | gzip | wc --bytes 34 Unexpected!
- W4ldi 8y agoActually not. Zipping itself produces some headers and metadata. Zipping can actually increase filesize. But the effect decreases the bigger the file you're zipping is.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoThe raw deflate stream is more in line with expectations: echo "GlooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOoria" | gzip --no-name | tail --bytes=+11 | head --bytes=-8 | wc --bytes 16
- isoskeles 8y agoOr how about a single word, e.g. Emotion.
- krapp 8y agoEntire sentences? In 2140 all popular songs will just be tag spam generated by AI. We'll look back on the days of "Versace" and "Gucci Gang" like they were poetry.
- bregma 8y agoTag spam? No. In just 2040 lyrics of pop songs will consist of nothing but a string of emojis.
- mikeash 8y agoActually they’ll be fragments that sound like bursts of static but are actually adversarial constructions that induce an unquenchable thirst for the great taste of Diet Pepsi(tm).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dingaling 8y agoSentences would be a luxury by then! I'd guess just one phrase and a catchy motif. I remember my mother tutting at The Police in the 80s for repetitive lyrics such as 'Message in a bottle'
- askvictor 8y agoThis is fantastic; any detail on the methods/APIs/code used to extract and wrangle the data?
- bschne 8y agoDidn't find it for this specific one (except for everything that's explained in the article and available as JS from the website of course...), but they have a youtube channel with some live-coding sessions and a recording of one project from start to finish [1]. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFuV9vMFVluW9CAOdS4Oluw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFuV9vMFVluW9CAOdS4Oluw
- 1_player 8y agoThis is outstanding UI on mobile. Very smooth, beautiful and educative. Love it.
- bspammer 8y agoIs there some sort of data visualization framework they're using? The article is indeed beautiful, it seems like a huge amount of work for a single page. The visualization of the compression algorithm in particular seems very bespoke.
- joshvm 8y agoThere are some posts about it: https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-scrollytelling/ https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-scrollytelling... And a whole category on it: https://pudding.cool/#how https://pudding.cool/#how And a repo for a "scrollytelling" library by the author: https://github.com/russellgoldenberg/scrollama/ https://github.com/russellgoldenberg/scrollama/ Source inspection is hard as it's all been bundled, but you can see some of the json data in there, and some custom functions to do the plot interactions. The plot code is almost certainly D3 (based on some of the non-obfuscated calls).
- merricksb 8y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987
- sbhn 8y agoIt’s called rythm. Musical fascists think rythm should just be played by the drums
- lucozade 8y agoIf you do feel the need to correct someone, it can often help your argument if you make some attempt to be correct yourself.
- Kye 8y agoWhat are you even arguing here? The same eight notes/words for five minutes is just as boring as the same eight percussion soundings for five minutes. I don't know what a music fascist is, but I'm sure they get bored with 8 bar loops too.
- plg 8y agoAre the data available somewhere?
- dasanman 8y agoIts music. It does not have to be about words
- nineteen999 8y ago> Its music That is, in many cases, subjective and debatable.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fredley 8y agoA bit off-topic, but it makes me think of how words and their setting has changed over history. In English music at least, words and how they were set was a big deal during the various switches between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th Century. Catholicism allowed for polyphonic music, where the words (in latin) were layered to produce very beautiful music. An extreme example is Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium that has 8 choirs of 5 parts each: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT-ZAAi4UQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT-ZAAi4UQQ However Protestantism required the words to be in English and sung without polyphony - so that they could be understood by all. For example another work of Tallis's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4fHU0Nales https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4fHU0Nales Byrd in particular wrote a lot of works in the Catholic idiom that he had to hide, for writing such music could have got him killed. https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/music/william-byrd-s-secret-catholic-masterpieces.html https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/music/william-b...
- sehugg 8y agoThe lyrics to secular Renaissance music wouldn't be too out-of-place today, for example this example from http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Jacques_Arcadelt http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Jacques_Arcadelt: How crazy is this thought, my lady: although you are craving for my death, if you do not help me by looking at me with that scornful countenance that gives me life, and which I miss so much: then, since who has no life cannot die and he who has life must die, then—if you give me life, you'll have my death, and I, through death, will gain my life.
- fredley 8y agoYes, and I imagine the text of many Madrigals is extremely compressible, especially if you include all the 'fa la la's verbatim.
- mcv 8y ago> However Protestantism required the words to be in English and sung without polyphony This is stated a bit too broadly. Some protestants preferred that, others didn't. Bach didn't have a problem with polyphony, for example.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoIt's because dance music, both electronic and R&B, have become more popular. 5 of the top 10 repetitive songs are dance tracks, either electronic or R&B.
- jojohack 8y agoAwesome post and presentation! I’m very curious if that raw song lyric data is available somewhere, would be fun to analyze it more. Here’s a small project I made that similarly lets you visualize song repetition: http://songbranch.gorch.com/ http://songbranch.gorch.com/
- snvzz 8y agoUnder the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree. --1984, George Orwell
- cutler 8y agoIt's not just the lyrics. There's a certain female voice that dominates the pop music industry. Repetitive doesn't come close. Clone would be more accurate. Pop music today is dominated by the X-Factor industry. In the 70s you had the influence of the music business moguls but there was still room for genuinely creative bands to appear on Top Of The Pops and in the UK Top 20.
- galago 8y agoSia Furler. She works on songs for other artists and also does 'demo performances' to help singers develop a song. She's written songs for Rhianna, Adele, Carly Rae Jepson, Katy Perry, etc.
- technofiend 8y agoHer but not just her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin From the Wikipedia article above Martin has written or co-written 22 Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits, most of which he has also produced or co-produced, including Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" (2008), Maroon 5's "One More Night" (2012), Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" (2014), and The Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face" (2015). Martin is the songwriter with the third-most number-one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon (26).[4] In addition, he has had the second most Hot 100 number-one singles as a producer (20), behind George Martin, who had achieved 23 by the time of his death.[4] Another article that covers Max and his competition. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/hit-charade/403192/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/hit-cha...
- kraftman 8y agoI'm all for cool websites but by the time i scroll low enough for the data to show on the graph, the graph is off the page. then i scroll back up and it removes the data from the graph!
- moufestaphio 8y agoYes, that was super annoying. Like I literally can't look at the graph the way you have it set up. Did they ever test this...?
- catacombs 8y agoDoesn't seem like it. Some Pudding visualizations just werk, others are Dumpster fires in the browser.
- catacombs 8y agoThat's how a lot of visualizations from Pudding are, especially on mobile. These pages are written by freelancers who are paid thousands of dollars per story. It's insane, especially if they don't browser test the product.
- dang 8y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987
- 3pt14159 8y agoI've been noticing that as channels get more custom tailored what is available to the mass market, where tastes are less refined, has been steadily receding in quality. Outcast to Drake; MacGyver to Ice Road Truckers. But the opposite has happened on the other end of the spectrum. Emancipator or Bonobo (or Romare or Pilotpriest or or Nicola Cruz or Nu or Pantha du Prince or Sampha) are just leagues better than what we had even ten years ago. Sure the mass market is drinking down Fast and the Furious 9 or Transformers 11 or Spiderman ∞, but the quality of the films that are targeted at the intelligentsia is head and shoulders above what we used to have. Even television has stratified. I think the internet has something to do with it. People follow people that are smarter than them because they learn from them or they interact with smarter people more because they tend to get upvoted more, but there is a window of potential interaction. None of my family members are on HN and very few of them follow me on Twitter (out of the 130+ of them). Then you move the smart people to the smart cities and the normal, day-to-day interaction that would have happened no longer does.
- Fins 8y agoThat's rather questionable assertion. Many people would not consider anything that's made by a "DJ" to be music, let alone high-brow one. It also might be that you have only now discovered that there is something better than beyonces and x-men movies. That doesn't mean that there weren't anything good before, just that you haven't seen it.
- transpy 8y ago> Many people would not consider anything that's made by a "DJ" to be music Deaf people?
- Fins 8y agoThose would count themselves lucky /s Arguing musical taste is rather pointless anyway.
- 3pt14159 8y agoBut the thing is that I've looked and can't find anything nearly as good. Some artists brush up against it here and there (Glitch Mob, edIT, even Daft Punk, Weezy, or Kanye) but the density of really good work is no where near what it is today. Speaking of Kanye, I actually think his last album was his best and that if he hadn't launched it with the following he built up when his work wasn't as developed (pre-Twisted Fantasy) his work would have a quarter of the following or less than it does today. He's one of the rare artists that keeps innovating after hitting it. The only place I see at least some measure of really quality work in the past compared to today is fiction: Tom Robbins, Greg Egan, PKD, and many, many others. There are some contemporaries I like better (Ted Chiang) but I don't pretend it's not a matter of personal taste. But TV or music or even most film that's pre-2005 is almost unconsumable it's so flat compared to what the 1%-ile is today.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- miramardesign 8y agoyup just like the mindless npc sheep that listen to that garbage.