Department of Music Pedagogy, Nuremberg University of Music, Nuremberg, Germany.
Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.
Sci Rep. 2024 Mar 28;14(1):5531. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x.
Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity. We find that pop music lyrics have become simpler and easier to comprehend over time: not only does the lexical complexity of lyrics decrease (for instance, captured by vocabulary richness or readability of lyrics), but we also observe that the structural complexity (for instance, the repetitiveness of lyrics) has decreased. In addition, we confirm previous analyses showing that the emotion described by lyrics has become more negative and that lyrics have become more personal over the last five decades. Finally, a comparison of lyrics view counts and listening counts shows that when it comes to the listeners' interest in lyrics, for instance, rock fans mostly enjoy lyrics from older songs; country fans are more interested in new songs' lyrics.
音乐在我们的日常生活中无处不在，而歌词在我们听音乐时起着不可或缺的作用。然而，歌词内容、过去几十年的时间演变以及特定类型的变化之间的复杂关系尚未得到充分理解。在这项工作中，我们使用了广泛的歌词描述符，包括歌词的复杂性、结构、情感和流行度，研究了五十年五个流派的西方流行音乐歌词的动态。我们发现，随着时间的推移，流行音乐歌词变得越来越简单，也更容易理解：歌词的词汇复杂性（例如，词汇丰富度或歌词的可读性）不仅降低了，而且我们还观察到结构复杂性（例如，歌词的重复性）也降低了。此外，我们证实了之前的分析结果，即歌词所描述的情感变得更加消极，而且歌词在过去五十年中变得更加个人化。最后，歌词浏览量和收听量的比较表明，当涉及到听众对歌词的兴趣时，例如，摇滚迷大多喜欢老歌的歌词；乡村音乐迷对新歌的歌词更感兴趣。
