Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? (2017)

https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/

by ductionist • 8 years ago

118 48 8 years ago

timlod• 8 years ago

This 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• 8 years ago

Degree 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_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• 8 years ago

Extrapolating these trends would suggest that all popular songs will just be repetitions of single sentences in the year 2140.

askvictor2• 8 years ago

So you're saying that Daft Punk was 150 years ahead of its time?

lake99• 8 years ago

But 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.

isoskeles• 8 years ago

Or how about a single word, e.g. Emotion.

krapp• 8 years ago

Entire 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• 8 years ago

Tag spam? No. In just 2040 lyrics of pop songs will consist of nothing but a string of emojis.

dingaling• 8 years ago

Sentences 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'

askvictor2• 8 years ago

This is fantastic; any detail on the methods/APIs/code used to extract and wrangle the data?

bschne• 8 years ago

Didn'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

1_player• 8 years ago

This is outstanding UI on mobile. Very smooth, beautiful and educative. Love it.

bspammer• 8 years ago

Is 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• 8 years ago

There are some posts about it: https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-scrollytelling...

And a whole category on it: https://pudding.cool/#how

And a repo for a "scrollytelling" library by the author: 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• 8 years ago

Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987

plg• 8 years ago

Are the data available somewhere?

dasanman• 8 years ago

Its music. It does not have to be about words

nineteen999• 8 years ago

Its music

That is, in many cases, subjective and debatable.

fredley3• 8 years ago

A 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

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

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-b...

mcv• 8 years 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.

fredley3• 8 years ago

Specifically English Protestantism, in this case. Some things were allowed to be polyphonic, such as Psalm settings, and Byrd made a point of setting Psalms that alluded to the struggles faced by Catholics at that time. Some referenced the desecration of Jerusalem, others were the known last words of martyrs.

Sicut Cervus (a setting of Psalm 42) is such an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yd5EE0hAB8

sehugg• 8 years ago

The 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:

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.

fredley3• 8 years ago

Yes, and I imagine the text of many Madrigals is extremely compressible, especially if you include all the 'fa la la's verbatim.

toomanybeersies3• 8 years ago

It'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• 8 years ago

Awesome 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/

snvzz• 8 years ago

Under 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• 8 years ago

It'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• 8 years ago

Sia 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• 8 years ago

Her but not just her: 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-cha...

kraftman• 8 years ago

I'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• 8 years ago

Yes, 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...?

catacombs2• 8 years ago

Doesn't seem like it. Some Pudding visualizations just werk, others are Dumpster fires in the browser.

catacombs2• 8 years ago

That'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• 8 years ago

Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323762

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987

3pt141592• 8 years ago

I'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.

Fins4• 8 years ago

That'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• 8 years ago

Many people would not consider anything that's made by a "DJ" to be music

Deaf people?

3pt141592• 8 years ago

But 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.

toomanybeersies3• 8 years ago

DJs don't make music, producers make music.

Many people wouldn't consider electronic music to be music or high brow. Many people are close minded.

Even within the electronic music scene, there's people that will dismiss genres as being not "real" music. A lot of people shit all over tech house for instance.

Udik• 8 years ago

the quality of the films that are targeted at the intelligentsia is head and shoulders above what we used to have.

Any examples?

Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? (2017)

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