Relating Musical Genre and Lyrical Repetition
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47611/jsrhs.v12i3.4929Keywords:
music genres, song lyrics, lyrical repetition, repetition in musicAbstract
In the literature on music and repetition, it has been found that both repetition and genre influence liking for music. Naturally, this leads to the question of whether repetition and genre influence each other. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that there is an association between songs’ musical genre and their amount of lyrical repetition. Using the percent compressibility of lyrics as a measure of repetitiveness, the average repetitiveness of ten songs for each of ten genres was compared across genres. Based on these measures of average repetitiveness, it was possible to separate the genres into categories that were statistically significantly different: R&B, pop, EDM, and hip-hop were most repetitive; Latin and country were moderately repetitive; and metal, rock, folk, and blues were least repetitive. This confirmed the hypothesis that there is an association between musical genre and lyrical repetition and establishes repetitiveness as a new criterion by which musical genres can be classified.
Downloads
References or Bibliography
Abeßer, J., Lukashevich, H., & Bräuer, P. (2012). Classification of Music Genres Based on Repetitive Basslines. Journal of New Music Research, 41(3), 239–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2011.641571
Appel, N. (2014). “Ga, ga, ooh-la-la”: the childlike use of language in pop-rock music. Popular Music, 33(1), 91–108. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24736973
Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., & Lapidis, R. (2008). The speech-to-song illusion. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124(4), 2471. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4808987
Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., & Lapidis, R. (2011). Illusory transformation from speech to song. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(4), 2245–2252. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3562174
Eerola, T. (2011). Are the Emotions Expressed in Music Genre-specific? An Audio-based Evaluation of Datasets Spanning Classical, Film, Pop and Mixed Genres. Journal of New Music Research, 40(4), 349–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2011.602195
Fujishima, T. (1999). Realtime Chord Recognition of Musical Sound: a System Using Common Lisp Music. Proceedings of the 1999 International Computer Music Conference (pp. 464–467). San Francisco: International Computer Music Association.
Getz, R. P. (1966). The Effects of Repetition on Listening Response. Journal of Research in Music Education, 14(3), 178–192. https://doi.org/10.2307/3344051
Hargreaves, D. J. (1984). The Effects of Repetition on Liking for Music. Journal of Research in Music Education, 32(1), 35–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/3345279
Hart, C. B., & Day, G. (2020). A Linguistic Analysis of Sexual Content and Emotive Language in Contemporary Music Genres. Sexuality & Culture, 24(3), 516–531. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-019-09645-z
Huffman, D. (1952). A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes. Proceedings of the IRE, 40(9), 1098–1101. https://doi.org/10.1109/JRPROC.1952.273898
Jakobovits, L. A. (1962). Effects of Repeated Stimulation on Cognitive Aspects of Behavior: Some Experiments on the Phenomenon of Semantic Satiation [Doctoral dissertation, McGill University]. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/c821gp587
LZW compression. (2023, January 25). Rosetta Code. https://rosettacode.org/wiki/LZW_compression
Klapuri, A. (1998). Automatic Transcription of Music. M.Sc. Thesis, Tampere University of Technology, Finland.
Margulis, E. H. (2012). Musical Repetition Detection Across Multiple Exposures. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 29(4), 377–385. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2012.29.4.377
Margulis, E. H., & Simchy-Gross, R. (2016). Repetition Enhances the Musicality of Randomly Generated Tone Sequences. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 33(4), 509–514. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26417434
McGeoch, C. C. (1993). Data Compression. The American Mathematical Monthly, 100(5), 493–497. https://doi.org/10.2307/2324310
Morris, Colin. (2017, May). Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? The Pudding. https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/
Negus, K., & Astor, P. (2015). Songwriters and song lyrics: architecture, ambiguity and repetition. Popular Music, 34(2), 226–244. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24736910
Nettl, B. (1983). The study of ethnomusicology: Thirty-one issues and concepts. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Nunes, J. C., Ordanini, A., & Valsesia, F. (2015). The power of repetition: repetitive lyrics in a song increase processing fluency and drive market success. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(2), 187–199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.12.004
Starnes, D. S., Tabor, J., Yates, D.S., & Moore, D.S. (2015). The practice of statistics (5th ed.). Ann Heath.
Taher, C., Rusch, R., & McAdams, S. (2016). Effects of Repetition on Attention in Two-Part Counterpoint. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 33(3), 306–318. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26417409
Thompson, C. (2021). Lyric-Based Classification of Music Genres Using Hand-Crafted Features. Reinvention: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research, 14(2), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.31273/reinvention.v14i2.705
Williams, M. L. (2018). The Influence of Genre and Musical Training on Ratings of Listener Enjoyment. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 217, 67–83. https://doi.org/10.5406/bulcouresmusedu.217.0067
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt.2), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025848
Zeeh, C. (2013, January 16). Famous Algorithms: The Lempel Ziv Algorithm [PDF]. Retrieved from https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~ece611/LempelZiv.pdf
Ziv, J. & Lempel, A. (1977). A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 23(3), 337–343. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1977.1055714
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2023 Sovannjet Lim; Soo Park
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright holder(s) granted JSR a perpetual, non-exclusive license to distriute & display this article.
