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!

Ragtime Ngrams

/ Andrew Gustar / Leave a comment

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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