We are surrounded by music everywhere, and it serves many functions: for example, to relieve boredom, fill uncomfortable silences, foster social cohesion and communication, or regulate emotions.1 One of the most salient components of a song is its melody, which conveys the emotion of the music through patterns of sound and silence. Another important component of a song is lyrics, which are sung in a language and convey meaning through the spoken syllables.
In the study described in this article, we ask people to listen to a wide range of musical genres and songs sung by a variety of singers. We then ask them what they think the singer was using the song for. For example, did the singer use it to dance or arouse love for someone? We find that people can guess what the song was used for with a high degree of accuracy, even though they do not know anything about the cultural context in which the song was created.
For the purposes of this research, we analyzed data from the Natural History of Song project, which consists of a large and varied set of field recordings. This dataset was randomly downsampled to guarantee a balanced distribution of songs across musical genres and years.
The resulting dataset contains 118,747 songs. The median lyrics view count for the songs in this dataset is