English song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the past five decades, according to a study that analyzes thousands of English rap, country, pop, R songs.
This is the main conclusion of a study published in the journal Scientific Reports led by researchers from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, which also concludes that all genders show an increase in the use of words related to anger.
Music is omnipresent in people’s daily lives and its lyrics play a fundamental role when listening to them, the authors report in their article. However, the complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over recent decades, and the specific variations of each genre are still not fully known.
This work investigates the dynamics of English lyrics in Western popular music across five decades and five genres, using a broad set of lyrical descriptors.
Thus, from a data set of 353,320 songs, the researchers extracted lexical, linguistic, structural, rhyme, emotion and complexity descriptors, and carried out two complementary analyses.
In essence, the team led by Eva Zangerle discovered that song lyrics have become simpler over time in several aspects: richness of vocabulary, readability, complexity and number of repeated lines.
For example, the number of different words used in songs has decreased, especially among rap and rock songs. Although, the number of words with three or more syllables has increased in rap songs, explains a magazine summary.
The researchers suggest that although the use of longer words has increased in rap songs, the overall increase in lyrical repetitiveness across multiple genres has led to simpler lyrics overall.
The results also coincide with those of previous research according to which the lyrics have become more negative, on the one hand, and more personal/emotional, on the other. All genders examined showed an increase in the use of anger-related words.
Regarding emotions, the use of emotionally positive and negative words increased in rap songs. In the songs of R
In another analysis of views of song content on the online lyrics platform Genius, researchers found that lyrics from older rock songs tend to be viewed more than lyrics from newer rock songs. However, the lyrics of newer country songs tend to be seen more than those of older country songs.
This could indicate that rock listeners prefer lyrics from older songs, while country listeners prefer lyrics from newer songs, the authors note.
