I have been doing a bit of work recently with the stats package R and trying out the visualisation library d3, so it seemed reasonable to load them up with some musical data and see what I could come up with. Here is the first result. It’s a force-directed graph of the lyric linkage within every one of the SpinTunes songs, showing how common words appear in a song and how they flow. Common words like ‘the’ or ‘and’ appear in the middle with lots of links, whilst short, uncommon phrases float around outside. Some of the longer or more complex songs don’t fit very well into the space below, but you can grab the circles and play around with them.
Just select an artist and one of their songs and the network will automatically update. Don’t forget to listen to the song using the embedded player above!
[UPDATE]
I have changed a few things since I originally posted this. The thickness of the links represents how often the two joined words appear together. As a result, you’ll often see choruses or repeated verses standing out because of common lines. The circle size now also represents the number of times each word appears in the lyrics.
Finally, I have posted a version that adjusts to the size of your web browser. This version will let you get a better view of more complex songs and let the visualisation fill your whole screen. Have fun!