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Woodward III, Robert Bruce

Engineering and Mathematical Sciences

2016

M.S.

Music is an ever-changing cultural reflection. It is deeply integrated into our society, ubiquitous in movies, television shows, restaurants, sport venues, churches and a plethora of other places. This thesis proposes that we consider the lyrics in popular music, as determined by Billboards Hot 100 chart, as a natural medium to analyze the changes in culture over the past half-century. Using this collection of lyrics, we analyze the change in relative frequency of individual words over time, and compare to works of literature. Furthermore, we use the ranking in the Top 100 as a metric with which to explore the relationship between usage of particular words and the popularity of the respective songs. We find that our data coincides with a previous hypothesis that the relative happiness of lyrics has decreased over time, and find that this also applies to the relative happiness of popular music.