Music has been shown to activate some of the broadest and most diverse networks of the brain.
As a result the impact of music and its content as always been an interesting topic for researchers across the globe as well as the music industry. The impact is more crucial when it comes to young minds — children and adolescents.
The amount of time children and adolescents spend listening to music in its various forms has continued to increase over the years. As such, the effect that music has on children and adolescents can be quite strong. Children often imitate what musical role models do and say, as their own personal identity develops. But the themes presented in the songs is bit alarming. More specifically, the following themes, which are featured often in some song lyrics, can be particularly troublesome:
- Drugs and alcohol abuse that is glamorized.
- Suicide as an “alternative” or “solution”.
- Graphic violence.
- Sex which may focus on control, devaluation of women, or violence toward women
Analyzing Lyrical Repetitiveness and Complexity:
Investigating if song lyrics are getting more repetitive and simpler over time. The scientific goals of our study would be to hopefully prove a meaningful trend over time within music lyrics in the top songs on the Billboard music charts. Our inference would be that as time goes on, popular music lyrics have become more repetitive as well as less complex. We are excited to learn how to process large data sets and derive interesting and useful information from them. Another benefit would be the chance to deepen our understanding of information retrieval systems.
Students: Arshdeep Singh, Chase Alder, Mike Cresswell and Sameer Puri