'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

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large corpus of metal song lyrics and audio features to uncover how lyrical topics relate to musical dimensions like hardness and darkness, revealing specific associations between themes and sound characteristics.

Contribution

It combines automated text analysis and audio feature modeling to connect lyrical topics with musical dimensions in metal music for the first time.

Findings

Positive correlation between hardness/darkness and themes like 'brutal death' and 'satanism'

Negative correlation between softness themes and personal/love topics

Identification of 20 typical lyrical topics in metal music

Abstract

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'.