Luis Alemany Madrid
Madrid
Updated Thursday, March 28, 2024-14:07
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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
ready-made phrases
of dubious meaning and whose effect is more similar to 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
have carried out the largest study to date on the evolution of the complexity of lyrics in pop songs over 50 years. Their 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, that they have
less variety of rhymes
and that they repeat choruses more often. Which are more means and less end.
To know more
Culture.
From Euphoria to Bad Bunny: the sadness hidden behind the great party of the contemporary world
Editor: LUIS ALEMANY Madrid
From Euphoria to Bad Bunny: the sadness hidden behind the great party of the contemporary world
Music.
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Editor: RAQUEL R. INCERTIS Madrid
Editorial: ILLUSTRATIONS: EVA C. SANCHO
Songs increasingly shorter and catchier in the age of TikTok: "Listening to Queen now would be unthinkable"
The study, which has been published by the scientific magazine
Science
, has considered 352,320 songs written or sung in English and published in 1970 and 2020, between the year of
Bridge over troubled water
by Simon and Garfunkel and that of
Blinding Lights
by The Weeknd, and has subjected them to 33 lexical, semantic and emotional descriptors that have been studied chronologically. That is to say: it has measured the
frequency in the use of pronouns, in the use of compound verbal forms, of periods, commas and question marks
, of words with complex meanings, of rhymes, of repeated lines, of positive feelings or negatives... The study has also categorized the songs into five genres: rock, pop, rap, country and rhythm & blues. And he has crossed the data with the popularity of the songs (number of listens) and their lyrics (frequency with which users consult them on the
genius.com
page ).
Conclusions? "In summary, we found that letters
have become simpler over time
in many ways: vocabulary richness, legibility, complexity, and number of repeated lines," the study's authors say 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. music genres and is related to the year the songs were released.
Rock listeners enjoy older song lyrics
, while country fans prefer newer song 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 tendency towards simplicity is seen above all in rap
, which 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 "repetitiveness" in rap. "While it is true that such repetitiveness could cause letters 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 an
increase in semantic simplicity
. That is, 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 are more complex, but this does not mean say that there are no 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 "it is a mistake to estimate only the relationship between complexity and probability of success
, since 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 tempo of
hit pop songs has slowed down, that their emotion has become more somber,
and that lyrics increasingly tend 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.