Abstract:
“Musicalization of the Culture” is the social science concept proposed by American philosopher George Stainer. He depicted the glooming future of music—it would be-come omnipresent while having increasing volume, repetitiveness, and monotony, which are ascribed to the de-base of literal aesthetics. Although research that relates to one or some of the predictions exists, neither of them en-compassing all these “musicalization” manifestations, nor do they study the trend over time. Therefore, this preliminary research tries to validate whether music has gained acoustic loudness, and lyrical repetitiveness, monotony, and simplicity in a computational fashion. Conducting time-series analysis with trend detection, we confirmed all these trends for music from 1970 to 2016 using the MetroLyrics dataset and Spotify API. To investigate the simultaneity of these trends, we further conducted synchrony analysis and found that there is little evidence they would influence each other in a lagged fashion. In addition, we briefly discussed the result by relating to the music industry change. Our research makes the first attempt to answer this music sociological preposition. On top of that, we also proposed novel metrics to quantify repetitiveness using closed frequent itemset mining, which could be luminous for future research.
