Attitudinal meaning and social struggle in heavy metal song lyrics: a corpus-based analysis

Cheung, Joyce Oiwun; Deng, Feng

doi:10.1080/10350330.2019.1601337

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Among the very few studies relying on corpus-based discourse analysis, the corpora that are used are limited to small-sized ones (usually less than 30 texts and around 100,000 words). And most previous studies focus on one sub-category of Appraisal System, for example, on engagement (Geng and Wharton, 2016; Huan, 2016), graduation (Li and Hu, 2015), or attitude (Adendorff et al, 2009; Cheung and Feng, 2019; Hommerberg and Don, 2015), which to some extent did not present a whole picture of the appraisal profiles in the discourse under investigation.…”

Section: Appraisal System and Corpus-based Discourse Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

How does China appraise self and others? A corpus-based analysis of Chinese political discourse

Тао

Zhu

2019

Discourse & Society

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Political discourse is a major site where ideological construction of both Self and Others is carried out. Based on a corpus of 98 political texts issued by Chinese governing bodies from 2000 to 2018, this study adopts Appraisal System to analyse the lexical items that indicate attitudes towards China and other countries with a view to revealing the ways in which China and other countries are appraised in Chinese political discourse. It is found that (1) Chinese political discourse does represent the ideological square of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation, but more frequently it negatively evaluates China’s things (appreciation) rather than its behaviours (judgement) while more negative appraisals are used to describe Others’ behaviours rather than Their things, (2) interestingly, while China upturns Others’ negative profiles, it also upscales negative presentation of Self; likewise, China mitigates negative presentation of both Self and Others, (3) Chinese political discourse allows more external voices when expressing its attitudes towards Self. The analysis shows that the producers of Chinese political discourse skilfully use appraisal resources, sometimes implicitly, to construct a subtle but dynamic ‘Self versus Other’ ideological structure in Chinese political discourse, which enhances the understanding of China’s moderate view on itself and others in its pursuit of national interests.

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Section: Appraisal System and Corpus-based Discourse Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

How does China appraise self and others? A corpus-based analysis of Chinese political discourse

Тао

Zhu

2019

Discourse & Society

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“…As in Mutegi et al (2014, p. 8), our procedure was to read the lyrics and to make note of any themes that arose. Because the lyrics were read line by line for meaning (Cheung & Feng, 2021) and because the unit of analysis was "a complete and independent thought" (Mutegi et al, 2014, p. 8), it was possible that more than one theme was identified as being present in a single song.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the Lyrical Content and Musical Features of a Crowd-Sourced, Australian Pandemic Playlist

Putter,

Krause,

Vidas

et al. 2023

Music & Science

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A recent examination of charting popular music before and during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that popular music lyrics during turbulent socioeconomic conditions had more negatively valenced words, providing support for the Environmental Security Hypothesis. However, the use of chart data alone cannot speak to what individuals are listening to against the backdrop of COVID-19. The present mixed-methods case study examined a crowd-sourced playlist ( n = 55 songs) created by Australian residents during an extended lockdown in September–October 2021. Qualitative analysis of the lyrics demonstrated that the selected music expresses a closeness to others, references to the current situation (such as illness and staying at home), negative emotions (including confusion and fear), a positive outlook (expressing perseverance and a will to survive), and a changing sense of time. Quantitative analyses compared the “pandemic playlist” songs to charting songs during the first six months of the pandemic in 2020 and the same period in 2021 ( n = 28 and 26 songs, respectively) with regard to their musical features (using scraped Spotify API data) and lyrical content (using Diction). The findings indicated that the songs included in the “pandemic playlist” differed significantly from the charting songs in 2020 and 2021 by being higher in energy (relative to 2020 and 2021) and less acoustic (relative to 2021). Additionally, the lyrics of the “pandemic playlist” songs had significantly more positively valenced words. These differences suggest that people believed music selected in response to the pandemic ought to be upbeat and realistic (playlist suggestions), but popular songs were relatively pensive and reflected uncertainty and isolation (chart data). These findings broaden our understanding of music listening behaviors in response to societal stress.

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“…[9]). Topics typically ascribed to metal lyrics include sadness, death, freedom, nature, occultism or unpleasant/disgusting objects and are over-Figure 1: Processing steps of the approach illustrating the parallel analysis of text and audio features all characterized as harsh, gloomy, dystopian, or satanic [23,9,28,22,5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Until now, investigations on metal lyrics were limited to individual cases or relatively small corpora -with a maximum of 1,152 songs in [5]. Besides this, the relation between the musical and the textual domain has not yet been explored.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

'Warriors of the Word' -- Deciphering Lyrical Topics in Music and Their Connection to Audio Feature Dimensions Based on a Corpus of Over 100,000 Metal Songs

Czedik-Eysenberg¹,

Wieczorek²,

Reuter³

2019

Preprint

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We look into the connection between the musical and lyrical content of metal music by combining automated extraction of high-level audio features and quantitative text analysis on a corpus of 124.288 song lyrics from this genre. Based on this text corpus, a topic model was first constructed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). For a subsample of 503 songs, scores for predicting perceived musical hardness/heaviness and darkness/gloominess were extracted using audio feature models. By combining both audio feature and text analysis, we (1) offer a comprehensive overview of the lyrical topics present within the metal genre and (2) are able to establish whether or not levels of hardness and other music dimensions are associated with the occurrence of particularly harsh (and other) textual topics. Twenty typical topics were identified and projected into a topic space using multidimensional scaling (MDS). After Bonferroni correction, positive correlations were found between musical hardness and darkness and textual topics dealing with 'brutal death', 'dystopia', 'archaisms and occultism', 'religion and satanism', 'battle' and '(psychological) madness', while there is a negative associations with topics like 'personal life' and 'love and romance'.

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Attitudinal meaning and social struggle in heavy metal song lyrics: a corpus-based analysis

Abstract: working on a discipline specific corpus-driven academic English enhancement programme. She holds a Master's degree in English Language Studies and a Bachelor's degree in Communication. Her interest is to apply a corpus-linguistic approach to study culture.

Cited by 8 publications

References 36 publications

How does China appraise self and others? A corpus-based analysis of Chinese political discourse

How does China appraise self and others? A corpus-based analysis of Chinese political discourse

Examining the Lyrical Content and Musical Features of a Crowd-Sourced, Australian Pandemic Playlist

'Warriors of the Word' -- Deciphering Lyrical Topics in Music and Their Connection to Audio Feature Dimensions Based on a Corpus of Over 100,000 Metal Songs

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