In Your Eyes: Identifying Clichés in Song Lyrics

In Your Eyes: Identifying Clich´es in Song Lyrics Alex G. Smith, Christopher X. S. Zee and Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia alex.geoffrey.smith@gmail.com xiashing@gmail.com sandrau@rmit.edu.au Abstract We investigated methods for the discov- ery of clich´es from song lyrics. Trigrams and rhyme features were extracted from a collection of lyrics and ranked using term-weighting techniques such as tf-idf. These attributes were also examined over both time and genre. We present an application to produce a clich´e score for lyrics based on these findings and show that number one hits are sub- stantially more clich´ed than the average published song. 1 Credits 2 Introduction Song lyrics can be inspiring, moving, energetic and heart wrenching pieces of modern poetry. Other times, we find lyrics to be boring and uninspired, or clich´ed. Some lyricists may aim to write truly original lyrics, while others are after a number one on the charts. The authors of The Manual (Drummond and Cauty, 1988), who have several hits to their credit, state that to succeed in achieving a number one hit one needs to “stick to the clich´es” because “they deal with the emotional topics we all feel”. Despite dictionary definitions, it isn’t easy to pinpoint what is clich´e and what isn’t. Dil- lon (2006) explains that linguists tend to pre- fer the term idiom or fixed expression. He also points out the subjective nature of the deci- sion as to whether a phrase is a clich´e, illus- trating this with some frequently used phrases that are not considered clich´ed, and other phrases such as ‘armed to the teeth’ that are, despite their relative infrequent appearance within corpora. There is also a temporal component to whether something is clich´e, since an expres- sion would not be considered clich´e on its first use, but only after widespread adop- tion. For song lyrics, clich´es can arise due to the perceived need to make rhymes. Some words have limited possibilities for rhyme, and so using exact rhyme makes clich´e more likely. Early songwriters believed that a good song must have perfect rhyme in its lyrics. However, recent thought is that alternatives, such as assonance and additive or subtractive rhymes, are valid alternatives in order to avoid clich´ed writing (Pattison, 1991). In this paper we use an information re- trieval approach to defining what is clich´ed in song lyrics, by using human judgements. We use statistical measures to build ranked lists of clich´ed trigrams and rhymes, then combine these results to produce an over- all clich´e score for a song’s lyrics. A sim- ple count of the occurrences of terms in song lyrics, ranked according to frequency is likely to produce generic common phrases rather than lyric-specific terms. Therefore we in- vestigated means of detecting typical rhymes and phrases in lyrics using a term-weighting technique. We examined trends in these at- tributes over musical genre and time. Using our results, we developed a clich´e score for song lyrics. The remainder …

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