The Times They Are A-Changin’ (or not): song lyrics analysis over the years

• Carolina C. Vieira UFMG
• Túlio C. Loures UFMG
• Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo UFMG
• Renato M. Assunção UFMG

Resumo

With the growth of music streaming services, the demand for organizing songs according to similarity has increased. In this way, this work proposes to study lyrics of popular songs in order to identify the changes in the vocabulary of the compositions. Analyzing the text, we look for evidences that the themes portrayed by the lyrics undergo changes over the years. When the words used in the compositions do not discriminate years or decades, the context in which those words are inserted causes their meaning to change. Thus, analyzing when certain words occur and how different contexts change their meanings, it is possible to characterize song lyrics temporally. In the future, this analysis can facilitate temporal classification tasks of song lyrics, which can be extended to other types of documents.