A song is a combination of two things—music and words. The music is called a melody, and the words are known as lyrics. The melodies and words of songs can be as complex as the refined stringency of a classical masterpiece, or as simple as the weary croon of a new mother singing her newborn to sleep.
The melody and lyrics of a song are what give it its distinctive style, and a particular way in which it speaks to a listener. Songs are often a portrayal of the culture, emotions, and values of society, and they can be a window into people’s shifting norms and feelings over time. Songs may also be a form of storytelling or a record of an event.
Music scholars have examined a wide variety of musical genres, but a new study finds that lyrical complexity has been decreasing over time for most types of pop and rock music. The research analyzed lyrics of popular songs on the online music database Genius, which tracks the type of language used in each song and provides a word count.
The researchers found a negative relationship between the release year and the song’s Maas score, which measures vocabulary richness. This indicates that a song’s lyrics are becoming simpler over time, which is in contrast to other musical factors such as texture and rhythm, which appear to be getting more complicated. These findings are consistent with earlier studies that found a similar decline in lyrical complexity in popular music, but the new research is much more extensive and includes many different genres of music, including country, pop, and rock.