Traditional and emotional stylometric analysis of the songs of Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon

Traditional stylometric measures such as word usage, word length, and word repetition were paired with six new measures that described word emotionality in terms of a word's pleasantness, its activation level, and the combination of these factors. All measurements were applied to the songs composed by Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon between 1962 and 1970. Stylistic and emotional differences between composers and across years were found to be in agreement with observations made by critics and analysts of Beatles' songs, suggesting that emotional stylometry is a valid instrument for the analysis of text. Lennon was the less pleasant and the sadder lyricist, and the Lennon-McCartney lyrics became less pleasant, less active, and less cheerful over time. Several other differences were observed and reported. A technique for summary emotional description (the emotion clock) was also introduced. Computer-driven stylometric analysis capitalizes on the computer's ability to count large numbers of words speedily and accurately. A question frequently addressed by early stylometrists was that of authorship or of differences among authors. Discussions taking place in the Shakespeare Newsletter of 1984 (4, 5) suggest that this question was of interest a dozen years ago. It continues to be of interest to researchers such as Smith ("Sir Thomas Moore, Pericles, and Stylometry" was published in 1994). A second common line of inquiryhas addressed the ontogenesis or development of style. Development comes into question when works of a single author (or those in a single category) are spread across a considerable span of time, during which they might have been expected to change. In his note on " 'Edmund Ironside' and Stylometry," Sams (470) recognizes the importance of changing styles, though he criticizes the assumptions that Smith used to describe Shakespeare's different modes of writing. Stylometry has been criticized for being a cold and impoverished method of textual analysis one which studies words without studying their meanings (Sams, 471). On the other hand, stylometry has been lauded for its relative objectivity (Merriam, 5). This report describes a new stylometric technique one which adds some degree of meaning to word-counting analyses and it applies this new technique, in conjunction with some standard stylometry, to the lyrics of songs written by Beatles' composers Paul McCartney and John Lennon. In his 1969 article, Charles Osgood (194-199) distinguished between the two types of meaning that may be carried by a word. The first is denotative or descriptive meaning, and the second connotative or emotional meaning. Denotative meaning is both complex and multidimensional. It is therefore very difficult to quantify. Connotative meaning, however, may be quantified in terms of two or three straightforward dimensions. The quantification of connotative meaning was pioneered by Osg0od with the help of the semantic differential rating technique. According to Osgood, three emotional dimensions (evaluation, potency, activation, or E, P, and A) were sufficient to