Tag: text analysis

Hip Hop and the LAPD

/ Andrew Gustar / Leave a comment

I was recently asked whether I had any data to support the claim that the number of mentions of the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) in hip hop lyrics has fallen off in recent years, after peaking in the mid-1990s. The LAPD attracted a lot of angry attention from hip hop artists in the wake of the 1992 LA riots, triggered when four LAPD officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. 

On the face of it, this claim should be easy to check: use a lyrics database to search for hip hop songs mentioning “LAPD”, find when they were released, and look at the trend. In practice, it turns out to be rather more complicated.

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Lute Music Analysis

/ Andrew Gustar / Leave a comment

I have recently exchanged a couple of emails with Jakob Hausladen, who has written a fascinating and enjoyable article on lute music, as part of a course on the philosophy of data science. The article draws on some of the techniques discussed on this site (including composers’ dates and nationalities, text analysis, publication network analysis), and also includes a section looking at a comparison of composers’ styles based on MIDI data. The article explains things well (including the risks and caveats), and makes excellent use of interactive graphics and sounds.

Like any good research, it raises lots of interesting questions for further investigation (some of which I have added to my list!)

I would recommend it for anybody interested in the use of statistics / data science to study music history. Or in lute music!

English Christmas Concerts

/ Andrew Gustar / Leave a comment

Concert-Diary has been advertising classical concerts since 2000, mainly in the UK, and (unlike some listings websites) allows you to go back and look at historic data. Concerts can be classified under several headings – one of which is “Christmas”, so I thought it would be interesting to look at this century’s Christmas concerts.

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Ragtime Ngrams

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The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a powerful tool for analysing historical text data. It uses the enormous corpus of books scanned by Google to analyse the frequency of words and phrases over time. An n-grams is just a combination of words – so a single word is a 1-gram, a pair of words a 2-gram, etc. The Google viewer has data up to 5-grams.

This has potential uses in many fields – including musicology. Here we will use the ngram viewer to analyse the rise and fall of ragtime music.

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Christmas Quiz: Name that Carol!

/ Andrew Gustar / Leave a comment

Here is a short festive quiz based on the lyrics of the top 30 carols on the carols.org.uk website. The challenge is to identify the carol from words that appear only in the lyrics of that carol and no other. So “merrily”, for example, only appears in one carol (clue: Ding Dong). It is just for fun – there is no prize other than a smug feeling and whatever you decide to reward yourself with!

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British Music Plaques

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Many British buildings are adorned with plaques, marking the birthplace or residence of a famous person, or the site of a significant event. Details of these plaques are available in an online database, and I thought it would be interesting to see how many of them have a musical connection.

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Song Lyrics 8: Parts of Speech Tagging

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In this previous post in the series, we used capitalisation to identify proper nouns (names, places, etc) in our dataset of song lyrics. Other parts of speech – verbs, adjectives, etc – are not so easy to identify, although software exists to do just that.

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Song Lyrics 7: Rhyme Time

/ Andrew Gustar

Previously, we have looked at repetition in our dataset of song lyrics. This seventh article in the series considers a related issue – rhyming patterns. We are only interested here in the last word of each line – i.e. the string of characters between the last space and the end-of-line character \n.

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Song Lyrics 6: Principal Components

/ Andrew Gustar / Leave a comment

This is the sixth in a series of articles looking at different ways of analysing a dataset of song lyrics. In this article we will be venturing into hyperspace to explore the differences and similarities between artists, in terms of the words they use in their songs.

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