I wouldn't think testing vocabulary would be a very good indicator of music's intelligence. In my mind, music has been getting less intelligent because the tools to make music these days have made the barrier to entry almost non-existent. No longer do you need to study and practice various musical/performance skills for years to be a musician and put out a record. All you need is a computer and some software.<p>It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. I think it's good that anyone can try their hand at making music, but at the same time, the saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall.<p>Or, maybe I'm just getting old?
At least the titles seem to have gotten less intelligent and... ruder.<p><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RczjGgSu4VU/VIs3dccjucI/AAAAAAAALes/XlZaGN81Ooc/s1600/billboard.png" rel="nofollow">https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RczjGgSu4VU/VIs3dccjucI/AAAAAAAAL...</a><p>from <a href="http://prooffreaderplus.blogspot.ca/2014/12/most-popular-songs-containing-most.html" rel="nofollow">http://prooffreaderplus.blogspot.ca/2014/12/most-popular-son...</a>
Pop music from 1959 - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgaZZl_GVg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgaZZl_GVg</a><p>Pop music is stupid because it's catchy. It's always been that way, always will be.
I think the article may have provided evidence for the opposite of what the author seems to believe:<p>"My results confirmed what Briggs had described: unique words and total words have risen over time, but the ratio has gone down significantly. This would suggest that pop lyrics have in fact gotten less eloquent."<p>I'd have to disagree... this just implies that modern pop songs are more lyrically repetitive, which is not immediately a sign of "less intelligence". It may be less enjoyable to some of us or you might call it "more insipid", but <i>given the definition of intelligence</i> (italicized because that's an important phrase in this paragraph) chosen at the beginning, it's still pulling from a larger vocabulary, and that still implies <i>higher</i> intelligence by the definition.<p>"Smarter people putting out more repetitive/insipid music" doesn't seem too shocking a result to me... the intelligence of a songwriter puts an upper bound on the intelligence of the song they can produce, but no lower bound.<p>There are still some confounding factors that could be at play though: Increased ethnic/cultural diversity could simply be introducing significantly more slang vocabularies into the songs. Rather than implying that any one performer is using a larger vocabulary, that would simply imply a certain dialectal diaspora, which wouldn't prove anything about the individual musicians.<p>So, now the part where I question the definition of intelligence being used. "Vocabulary size" isn't a bad choice of proxy for at least a fun analysis, but perhaps instead of graphing the years as a whole, each song should be analyzed for things like word count, then we can look at the population statistics instead of the summed words. If the individual songs are as a whole using more vocabulary, I would consider that stronger evidence than if the songs all turn out merely to have dialect differences. In fact it's completely mathematically possible for the set of all Top 50 songs in later years to use more different words as a whole even as each individual song is simpler than the individual songs of the past.<p>And, if this really <i>was</i> a real effect, if word gets back to the pop song creators, the very act of observing the vocabulary has gotten more difficult could well cause the pop songs to get simpler over the next few years....
The article doesn't answer the question it set out to answer. The poster, being a (fellow) programmer, was (probably) more focused on working out how to scrape the data than on figuring out how to determine the intelligence of a song's lyrics reliably. The methods he came up with don't answer the original question at all.
Nice job! :-) I think that music (melodies, riffs, combination of sounds and notes, etc...) are getting very stupidier. I don't have tools nor skills to test this assumption, just my hears. Try to listen MTV for some month and you'll see that a lot of new songs are <i>very</i> similar to other ones. I mean, too much similar.
It seems like a topic that is really going to need a bit more research and analysis. I don't think a vocabulary test quite does it. Comparing something like Elvis Presley playing "Hound Dog" to Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" would make me think that modern pop is more intelligent.
I don't think unique-words/total-words can be used directly as a metric for intelligence of lyrics. In any body of text, I'd expect that ratio to go down as total-words increases. For some extreme example, if there is one total word, then the ratio is 1.0. If there are infinitely many words, then the ratio is 0.0. That doesn't really say anything about how intelligent they are. Without knowing anything specifically about it, I'd expect unique words to roughly scale logarithmically with total words for a constant "intelligence", whatever that means.
So, the post says that pop lyrics are getting stupider because the ratio of unique words to total words has went down, though both total words and unique words have gone up. I'm not very convinced. How do you know that the right metric isn't something like unique/sqrt(total)? Can we figure out the right metric from first principles?
The mainstream part of pop has always been equally stupid. I have a hunch that i can't prove, however, that the 'eclectic' part of pop has become significantly dumber. We don't have as many distinct new genres as in the 90s for example, and that may mean that music is more homogeneized in general.
I applaud the author for not succumbing to the superciliousness of William Briggs. The irony of the linked article "Proof That Music is Growing Worse" made me chuckle a bit, and then made me feel a little disappointed.<p>Thank you for providing an interesting, objective analysis without injecting unfounded opinions.
There has been terrible pop music since pop music began. Try and make it all the way to the end of this song from the golden 60s - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhYLz63csS0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhYLz63csS0</a>
Popular music is the music listened to by most people by definition. Most people are not very smart (not to say they are stupid). Therefore, pop(ular) music will never be intelligent as it needs to attune to a lot of people that are not that smart. I got tired of the gimmicky pop years ago and switched completely to classical and folk music.