Complexity Analysis of Pop Song Lyrics

Informs 2022

Andrew Henshaw

The Concept

  • Most pop songs have some degree of repetition in the lyrics
  • When does a song have "too much" repetition or "not enough" complexity?

The Complexity-Scoring Algorithm

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's alright
Tokenize the lyrics, removing all punctuation here comes the sun here comes the sun and i say it's alright
Map each unique word to a 16-bit integer and regenerate. 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Identify repetitions and compress (gzip) x = 1 2 3 4
x x 4 5 6 7 8 9
100*(compressed length/uncompressed length) Score = 53
Lyrical Website