Ragged Clown

It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing…


May
9
2014

Songs Without Love

I was wondering what songs are about. Most of them are about love of course but what about the other ones?

Terry Gross had a dude on the other day who wrote songs about a bomb that went off his train carriage on the way to Machu Pichu. Abba won the 1974 Eurovision Song Context with a song about Waterloo. Are there any other songs about weird topics?

I haven’t done a fun science project for a while and I need to learn about the latest versions of Ruby & Rails & Elastic Search & D3 & Hicharts. I also want to dabble in some NLP stuff—sentiment analysis; classifiers; that kind of thing.

Here’s the TODO list:

* Grab every top 100 song since Al Martino in 1952.
* Grab all the lyrics to all the songs.
* Build a word cloud for each song.
* Build a word cloud for each week/year/decade.
* Do cluster analysis to find interesting topics.
* Write a classifier that can figure out what each song is about (love, war, bombs, whatever).
* Plot how that changes over time.
* Do sentiment analysis to see if songs are happy or sad.
* Plot how that changes over time.

The results will be here:

http://www.songswithoutlove.com/

If you know Ruby (or want an excuse to learn) fork my repo and play along.

https://github.com/klawrence/songs-without-love

I need to get this finished by next year. The year after that at the very latest.