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 <i>big</i> deal during the various switches between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th Century.<p>Catholicism allowed for polyphonic music, where the words (in latin) were layered to produce very beautiful music. An extreme example is Thomas Tallis's <i>Spem in Alium</i> that has 8 choirs of 5 parts each:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT-ZAAi4UQQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT-ZAAi4UQQ</a><p>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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4fHU0Nales" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4fHU0Nales</a><p>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.<p><a href="https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/music/william-byrd-s-secret-catholic-masterpieces.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/music/william-b...</a>
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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: <a href="http://songbranch.gorch.com/" rel="nofollow">http://songbranch.gorch.com/</a>
This is a cool analysis featuring an interesting metric (degree of compressibility) for measuring repetitiveness in song lyrics.
Great graphics explaining the algorithm too!<p>Spoiler: Lyrics do seem to get more repetitive.
It's because dance music, both electronic and R&B, have become more popular.<p>5 of the top 10 repetitive songs are dance tracks, either electronic or R&B.
Discussed at the time:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323762" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323762</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987</a>
Under the spreading chestnut tree<p>I sold you and you sold me:<p>There lie they, and here lie we<p>Under the spreading chestnut tree.<p>--1984, George Orwell
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!
Discussed at the time:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335987</a>