the most metal words of all time
At Degenerate State, there was an interesting post where someone applied natural language processing models to heavy metal lyrics. From the article:
To get the lyrics, I scraped www.darklyrics.com. While darklyrics doesn’t have a robots.txt file, I tried to be gentle with my requests. After cleaning the data up, identifying the languages and splitting albums into songs, we are left with a dataset containing lyrics to 222,623 songs from 7,364 bands spread over 22,314 albums.
Before anyone asks, I have no intention of releasing either the raw lyric files or the code used to scrape the website. I collected the lyrics for my own entertainment, and it would be too easy for someone to use this data to copy darklyrics. If people are interested I may release some n-gram data of the corpus.
So what do you find? A few tidbits – the heavy metal word cloud:
Then, the most “metal words:”
| Rank | Word | Metalness |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | burn | 3.81 |
| 2 | cries | 3.63 |
| 3 | veins | 3.59 |
| 4 | eternity | 3.56 |
| 5 | breathe | 3.54 |
| 6 | beast | 3.54 |
| 7 | gonna | 3.53 |
| 8 | demons | 3.53 |
| 9 | ashes | 3.51 |
| 10 | soul | 3.40 |
| 11 | sorrow | 3.40 |
| 12 | sword | 3.38 |
| 13 | goodbye | 3.28 |
| 14 | dreams | 3.28 |
| 15 | gods | 3.24 |
| 16 | pray | 3.22 |
| 17 | reign | 3.15 |
| 18 | tear | 3.12 |
| 19 | flames | 3.12 |
| 20 | scream | 3.11 |
And the least metal words:
| Rank | Word | Metalness |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | particularly | -6.47 |
| 2 | indicated | -6.32 |
| 3 | secretary | -6.29 |
| 4 | committee | -6.16 |
| 5 | university | -6.09 |
| 6 | relatively | -6.08 |
| 7 | noted | -5.85 |
| 8 | approximately | -5.75 |
| 9 | chairman | -5.69 |
| 10 | employees | -5.67 |
| 11 | attorney | -5.66 |
| 12 | membership | -5.64 |
| 13 | administrative | -5.61 |
| 14 | considerable | -5.60 |
| 15 | academic | -5.51 |
| 16 | literary | -5.49 |
| 17 | agencies | -5.48 |
| 18 | measurements | -5.47 |
| 19 | fiscal | -5.45 |
| 20 | residential | -5.45 |
The bottom line? Academia, the law and administration are the least metal topics of all time. Who knew?
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