Traditional and emotional stylometric analysis of the songs of Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon

Abstract

Traditional stylometric measures such as word usage, word length, and word repetition were paired with six new measures that described word emotionality in terms of a word's pleasantness, its activation level, and the combination of these factors. All measurements were applied to the songs composed by Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon between 1962 and 1970. Stylistic and emotional differences between composers and across years were found to be in agreement with observations made by critics and analysts of Beatles' songs, suggesting that emotional stylometry is a valid instrument for the analysis of text. Lennon was the less pleasant and the sadder lyricist, and the Lennon-McCartney lyrics became less pleasant, less active, and less cheerful over time. Several other differences were observed and reported. A technique for summary emotional description (the emotion clock) was also introduced.

Ngram and Bayesian Classification of Documents for Topic and Authorship

“…For example, if we have a number of documents, and don't know how many authors are represented, nor if any documents are labelled, then we have a much more difficult problem. Whissell (1996) performed stylistic analysis on Beatles songs, and showed that simple stylistic criteria could be used to reliably differentiate between songs authored by John Lennon or Paul McCartney. As an experiment, we implemented an ngram-based probabilistic clustering solution to this problem using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm (McLauchlan and Khrishnan, 1997).…”

Linguistic Complexity of Abstracts and Titles in Highly Cited Journals

“…The top 5% journals had citation counts ranging from 16,146 to 2,269. PreQctors were emotional and stylistic variables calculated with the help of a computer program (Whissell, 1996(Whissell, , 1997. Frequency, impact, and immediacy of citation served as criteria in multiple regression analyses after Frequency had been submitted to a log (base 10) transformation to correct for extreme positive skew.…”

“…Sentence length in number of words, the proportional use of rare words, how much the titles were punctuated, the proportion of numerals in the abstract, and the emotional tone of the abstract measured in terms of Pleasantness and Activation were assessed for each journal (Table 1). Values for Pleasantness and Activation, which were derived from ratings of matched individual words in a database called the Dictionary of Affect (Whissell, 1996(Whissell, , 1997 &d not address the denotive issue of accuracy but rather described the connotative emotional experience likely to be encountered by readers perusing abstracts. Values for Pleasantness and Activation, which were derived from ratings of matched individual words in a database called the Dictionary of Affect (Whissell, 1996(Whissell, , 1997 &d not address the denotive issue of accuracy but rather described the connotative emotional experience likely to be encountered by readers perusing abstracts.…”

Collaboration, cognitive effort, and self-reference in United Kingdom top 5 pop music lyrics 1960–2015.

“…Numerous musicological works have of course considered collaborations. For example, Everett (1999) considered Lennon and McCartney's music in terms of the interpersonal relationships between the band members over time; and Whissell (1996, 2003, Whissell & Whissell 2000 found that, compared to McCartney, Lennon "used fewer pleasant words, and more nasty, soft, and sad ones", among a number of other POP MUSIC LYRICS 5 differences. The psychological phenomenon of greatest potential relevance to this is social loafing (see Karau & Williams, 1993, 2001).…”