is it actually about dragons?

Some years in the past, Matt Daniels [1] wrote an ideal article on who has the most important vocabulary in hip-hop. I believed it was sensible: evaluating Shakespeare to well-known hip-hop artists. It received me considering and gave me the inspiration of doing one thing related with a style I really like: Energy Steel. Folks know steel or heavy steel however not essentially energy steel. For me, energy steel has velocity (do not forget that final tune on Guitar Hero), clear vocals (you possibly can perceive the phrases, you grind steel) and lyrics about dragons. Right here I’ll simply affirm or infirm my assumption about dragons.

I used the lyrics of 58 bands, which ought to fall beneath the label of Energy Steel, a minimum of based on /r/powermetal [2] and myself. This text will dive into the vocabulary of the facility steel bands, what makes a tune energy steel or not and who wrote essentially the most constructive and unfavorable energy steel songs ever (a minimum of from my dataset).

TL;DR

• Working Wild (2949 distinctive phrases) has the largest vocabulary, adopted by Helloween (2641) and Elvenking (2505),
• Bands from Spain, Germany and Finland have a mean of greater than 1600 phrases vocabulary; compared native international locations like UK, US and Scotland have a mean of 925, 1383 and 1501 phrases respectively,
• Probably the most steel phrases are deliverance, defender, honour, forevermore, realm and the least are shit, child, fuck, lady, verse,
• Probably the most unfavorable tune is Condemned To Hell by Gamma Ray and essentially the most constructive There’s One thing In The Skies by Darkish Moor,
• Supply code: to be launched quickly,
• Dataset: not out there however yow will discover lyrics everywhere in the web 😉

The dataset

The dataset consists of 58 bands: Alestorm, Angra, At Vance, Avantasia, Blind Guardian, Borealis, Cain’s Providing, Concerto Moon, Darkish Moor, Demons & Wizards, Dragonforce, Dragonland, Dream Evil, Edguy, Elegy, Elvenking, Fairyland, Falconer, Firewind, Freedom Name, Gamma Ray, Gloryhammer, Grave Digger, Hammerfall, Heavenly, Helloween, Hibria, Highland Glory, Iron Savior, Judicator, Kamelot, Keldian, Labyrinth, Misplaced Horizon, Manowar, Masterplan, Nightwish, Nocturnal Rites, Orden Ogan, Pagan’s Thoughts, Pathfinder, Persuader, Energy Quest, Powerwolf, Primal Worry, Rhapsody, Rhapsody Of Fireplace, Working Wild, Sabaton, Secret Sphere, Seventh Marvel, Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, Theocracy, Twilight Drive, Twilightning, Unisonic, Knowledge; and a complete of 4808 songs in English.

Distribution of bands by nation

Bands from Germany and Sweden are over-represented in comparison with different international locations. That is as a result of dataset creation, which was largely based mostly on the albums advice of /r/powermetal. Subsequently I received’t go deeper in areas distinction.

Vocabulary

Calculating the vocabulary size may very well be performed in a number of methods: counting the distinctive phrases (with inflections, that means singular, plural nouns, conjugated verbs, and so on.), counting the lemma type of the phrases (roughly the dictionary type) and at last the stemmed model which is if you get the stem of a phrase (we scale back a phrase to the its minimal non-changing elements). There is no such thing as a proper strategy to do the counting. All of the strategies have their execs and cons:

• stemming must be quick however the slicing would possibly scale back to a stem frequent to 2 totally different phrases (ex: markets/advertising would give the stem market);
• lemmatization requires realizing the a part of speech (POS) which could gradual your processing however could be extra correct.

Since I most well-liked quick outcomes over a attainable higher accuracy, I selected the stemmed model (Porter) of the phrases for the vocabulary processing. Based mostly on this stemming transformation, I may plot the next chart describing the expansion of vocabulary vary alongside the years (from 1982 to 2018).

Play with the slider it is interactive!

Largest vocabulary in PowerMetal in distinctive phrases* (in 2018)

1. Working Wild (2949)
2. Helloween (2641)
3. Elvenking (2502)
4. Sonata Arctica (2467)
5. Edguy (2385)

* _{a minimum of in my dataset}

What makes an influence steel tune energy steel?

We have to take a look at the significance of the phrases used within the tune. Widespread metrics are tf (time period frequency of a phrase), idf (inverse doc frequency, how uncommon a phrase is in a doc), tf-idf (time period frequency-inverse doc frequency, measuring how necessary a phrase is in a corpus)[3].

Iain Barr selected the tf strategy and measured the Metalness of a phrase / lyrics as observe:

$$ M_w = log frac{freq^{metal-corpus}_w}{freq^{corpus}_w} $$

the place $M_w$ is the Metalness of a phrase, $freq^{metal-corpus}_w$ the frequency of the phrase $w$ within the steel corpus, $freq^{corpus}_w$ the frequency of the phrase $w$ in one other corpus.

He seemed on the distribution of a selected phrase in two corpus – his steel lyrics dataset and the Brown corpus, an ensemble of literary texts from the 60s [4].

Nonetheless utilizing a literary corpus won’t be best since the kind of textual content and selection of phrases between a novel and a lyric are fairly totally different. I selected to make use of a dataset already ready known as Metrolyrics dataset, out there on Kaggle [5].

After a little bit of cleansing and processing, I received the next outcomes (interactive chart):

An influence steel isn’t essentially about dragons (within the forty seventh place within the Metalness rating): it’s all about deliverance, honour, defender, realm with a forevermore contact. Trying on the high 50 phrases, all these phrases wouldn’t seem misplaced in a heroic fantasy novel or a dungeons & dragons handbook.

On the other, phrases like shit, child, fuck, lady, verse aren’t that steel.

PowerMetalness rating

Probably the most energy steel songs 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘

1. Freedom Name – 66 Warriors
2. Grave Digger – The Emperor’s Dying
3. Manowar – Hail And Kill
4. Dream Evil – Made Of Steel
5. Primal Worry – Evil Spell

The least energy steel songs 🤘

1. Gamma Ray – Cash
2. Helloween – Something My Mama Do not Like
3. Iron Savior – Dance With Anyone (Mando Diao cowl)
4. Highland Glory – Love Gun (KISS cowl)
5. Masterplan – Black Canine (Led Zeppelin cowl)

As you discover, the least energy steel songs are largely covers of non energy steel bands, which is smart.

If we glance additionally at what phrases are a very powerful for every band, it is possible for you to to differentiate what makes these bands distinctive. Let’s take a look at some iconic bands reminiscent of Alestorm, Manowar, Rhapsody and Sabaton.

Alestorm

Phrases: drink, sail, sea, pirate, quest
For a band which is a part of the pirate steel style, these phrases are the right illustration of pirate-related vocabulary.

Manowar

Phrases: die, experience, steel, reside, struggle
My information of Manowar is a bit missing however this iconic band appears to offer significance to equally iconic phrases.

Rhapsody

Phrases: holy, historical, king, wind, land
One among my favourite bands. Their lyrics are epic and a very powerful phrases for them symbolize that.

Sabaton

Phrases: warfare, loss of life, military, strike, manner
Sabaton writes so much about actual wars and that is mirrored of their high phrases.

See Also

What’s Two-Tower Embedding Mannequin?

Cluster bands by their lyrics

Lyrics can be utilized to search out similarities between bands. To take action, I’m utilizing hierarchical clustering, a clustering method the place you don’t have to already know the variety of clusters in your knowledge prematurely.

Observe that Rhapsody and Rhapsody of Fireplace are clustered collectively. For individuals who won’t know, Rhapsody of Fireplace broke into in two bands, one maintaining the unique title and the opposite turning into Rhapsody. From a lyric viewpoint, as Luca Turilli wrote most if not all of the songs for the bands, these two bands are principally the identical which is confirmed within the clustering graph.

Out of this clustering emerge 4 clusters (interpretations my very own, glad to listen to yours):

• Rhapsody-ish: uplifting epic and fantasy lyrics
• Edguy-ish: wide selection of lyrics (?)
• Blind Guardian-ish: darkish epic lyrics
• Manowar-ish: brutal, highly effective lyrics

Some bands are remotely affiliated with others:

• Affiliated however unbiased: Gloryhammer with Rhapsody-ish, Alestorm with Manowar-ish
• The outsider: Concerto Moon (Japanese band)

The cluster is likely to be improved by wanting on the matters of the lyrics and work from that.

Sentiment evaluation

After having seemed into the phrases, let’s really feel them. I take advantage of VADER (Valence Conscious Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) to research the emotions within the lyrics. The datasets VADER was constructed upon embrace tweets, film/amazon evaluations and New York Instances editorials. The authors declare that it’s “particularly attuned to sentiments expressed in social media” [6] nevertheless it shouldn’t affect a lot my evaluation.

Optimistic sentiments

Out of 58 bands, solely 20 bands have been thought-about total as constructive. I’m not shocked by this because the lyrics in energy steel are about epic themes which aren’t per se essentially the most joyous theme.

Songs

Probably the most constructive songs within the dataset

1. Darkish Moor – There’s One thing In The Skies
2. Sonata Arctica – I Have A Proper
3. Sonata Arctica – Half A Marathon Man
4. Energy Quest – Sacred Land
5. Freedom Name – A Excellent Day

Bands

1. Twilight Drive
2. Freedom Name
3. Nightwish
4. Fairyland
5. Energy Quest

Detrimental sentiments

Songs

Probably the most unfavorable songs within the dataset

• Gamma Ray – Condemned To Hell
• Dragonforce – Battle!
• Sabaton – Burn In Hell
• Edguy – Sacred Hell
• Working Wild – Genocide

Simply wanting on the titles of the songs are sufficient to say we aren’t speaking about bunnies and candy muffins.

Bands

• Sabaton
• Judicator
• Hibria
• Dragonforce
• Powerwolf

Energy Steel isn’t that into dragons (forty seventh rank). Certainly Energy Steel has a fantasy and epic fashion the place in fact dragons do not conflict with the theme.
The challenge was enjoyable to do and I found new bands alongside the best way. There shall be some updates on the evaluation sooner or later, as I’d add new bands and construct on individuals’s feedbacks. I plan to launch the supply code I used for this evaluation after some cleansing.

If you’d like me so as to add your favourite band(s), send me an email and I’ll strive my greatest so as to add it/them!

In the meantime hold 🤘!

Acknowledgement

• Jorge, for the good feedback and recommendation

1. https://pudding.cool/2017/02/vocabulary/index.html
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerMetal/wiki/essential
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf-idf
4. https://www.degeneratestate.org/posts/2016/Apr/20/heavy-metal-and-natural-language-processing-part-1/
5. https://www.kaggle.com/gyani95/380000-lyrics-from-metrolyrics
6. https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment