It's a little music that we can hear in the mouths of music lovers and that a study is now singing in turn: over time, the lyrics of the songs have become poorer, becoming simpler and repetitive. To arrive at this observation, detailed this Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, researcher Eva Zangerle, from the University of Innsbruck (Austria), and her team analyzed the texts of 12,000 country, pop, R&B and rap songs. and rock in English released between 1980 and 2020.
“We find that the lyrics have become simpler over time in multiple aspects,” write the authors, citing in particular “the richness of the vocabulary,” “the complexity” and “the number of repeated lines.” “The most surprising thing for me is that these conclusions are supported by many different indicators”, insists to our newspaper Eva Zangerle, who mentions a greater quantity of refrains and a less “variety in rhymes”.
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