Researchers from Germany and Austria analyze 352,320 topics between 1970 and 2020 and discover that the vocabulary has become poorer, that the topics have been simplified and that the rhymes have become more repetitive
What are the lyrics of a song? Is it literature as Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize ruling said? Is it the way a musical instrument expresses itself called the human voice? Is it a succession of idioms of dubious meaning and whose effect is more like that of commercial slogans than that of poetry? Is it the difference between a song that excites your listeners and one that doesn’t?
Everything can be, it all depends. A group of researchers specialized in music, computing, artificial intelligence and emotional perception from universities in Germany and Austria has produced the largest study yet of the evolution of lyrical complexity in pop songs over 50 years. His conclusion is that song lyrics today are poorer in lexicon and syntax, that they deal more and more with concrete issues and not with abstract ideas, which have less variety of rhymes and that they repeat the choruses more often. Which are more means and less end.
The study, which has been published by the scientific journal Sciencehas considered 352,320 songs written or sung in English and published in 1970 and 2020, between the year of Bridge over troubled water of Simon and Garfunkel and that of Blinding Lights by The Weeknd, and has subjected them to 33 lexical, semantic and emotional descriptors that he has studied chronologically. That is to say: he has measured the frequency in the use of pronouns, in the use of compound verbal forms, periods, commas and question marks, of words with complex meanings, of rhymes, of repeated lines, of positive or negative feelings… The study has also categorized the songs into five genres: rock, pop, rap, country and rhythm & blues. And it has crossed the data with the popularity of the songs (number of listens) and its lyrics (frequency with which users consult them on the page genius.com).
Conclusions? “In summary, we find that the letters They have become simpler over time in many ways: richness of vocabulary, readability, complexity and number of repeated lines,” say the authors of the study in their article for Science. “Our results confirm previous research that found that lyrics have become more negative, on the one hand, and more personal in theme, on the other. Furthermore, our experimental results show that listeners’ interest in lyrics varies across all levels. musical genres and is related to the year of release of the songs. Rock Listeners Enjoy Older Song Lyricswhile country fans prefer new lyrics.”
Emilia Parada-Cabaleiro from Vigo, one of the authors of the study, explains to EL MUNDO what data best explains the meaning of the study. “The trend towards simplicity is seen above all in rapwhich is not trivial, given the central role that lyrics play in this musical genre.” Parada-Cabaleiro, professor of Music History in Nuremberg and researcher in Artificial Intelligence, explains that the descriptor that attracts the most attention is the “of repetitiveness” in rap. “While it is true that such repetitiveness could cause the lyrics to become longer over time, in absolute terms, the words used are shorter, further confirming this trend.”
“As an anecdote,” Parada-Cabaleiro continues, “it is interesting that in rock, simplification is observed in a increased semantic simplicity. That is to say, if we compare the rock lyrics of the 90s with those of now, we see that linguistic richness has been lost, since modern songs prioritize commonly used vocabulary. This, however, is not observed in rap.”
Has this path towards simplification been more or less constant or does it have a curve of ups and downs during the 50 years that you consider? “Let’s say that, in general, the trend is towards simplification. Internal changes are more prominent in some musical genres than in others, but in general no sudden changes are observed in the global trend,” explains the researcher.
Is there a relationship between lyrical complexity and the likelihood of your song’s success? Has the frequency with which songs with more sophisticated lyrics have had an impact on the public been measured and whether that frequency varies over time? “The probability of success itself is difficult to estimate,” responds Parada-Cabaleiro. “The information we had was the let’s say objective popularity, both of the lyrics and of the songs in general. We know, for example, that for rock, old lyrics are more successful and at the same time they are more complex, but this does not mean that there are not more factors, which there are, that play an important role. The question is interesting, but to be able to answer it we would have to consider ‘popularity’ as the dependent variable instead of the year. With the analysis that we have done, It would be a mistake to estimate only the relationship between complexity and probability of successsince in our model both descriptors were used as predictors, among others.”
The study in which Parada-Cabaleiro has participated is the most ambitious so far, at least in the sample size, but it is not the first to apply a qualitative analysis on a set of songs taken as data. Previous research has already shown that the time of hit pop songs has slowed down, its emotion has become more somber and that letters tend, increasingly, to use the first person singular. Sad, self-absorbed songs, with simple and a little bit harsh stories, that seems to be what we ask of music.
