Are we singing sillier?
Everyone has heard it from someone... "Music was better in my day". As a parent of teenagers, I'm pretty sure I've even said it. But who's right? Which decade's pop music is linguisitcally more interesting, and is there a trend? Using Python and some text analysis I will attempt to answer these questions and more. By the end of the talk all will be revealed... and we can happily sing along to some pop songs safe in the knowledge that they are linguisitcally superior.
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I want a ticket!I will use the time to break down the process of discovering the answer to the question "is pop music less linguistically complex these days". What questions did I come up with to drive my investigation? What language processing did I do? How does it break down by genre? This is an interesting investigation that has lots of examples that will encourage debate in the audience and hopefully we'll take the arguments out into the next break. I will use Python and Pandas and a couple of libraries to show the process of the language analysis of the lyrics of the top songs each year since the 50s. By the end everyone will know what the data shows about linguistic complexity of pop lyrics and will have had some fun along the way.
Amanda is a teacher at a co-educational secondary school in Sydney. She's been trying to find really effective and engaging ways to teach students how to solve problems with code for some time now with mixed success. She is a contributor, content creator and tutor for the Sydney branch of the Girls Programming Network. She is the current treasurer of the ICT Educators professional association in NSW and in that role tries hard to mentor new teachers or teachers new to computing. She always has some project on the go from e-textiles to making web tools to make her life easier. In a former life she was a database and web developer. In her opinion Python is the best mix of power and ease of use for beginner programmers. In her spare time she throws herself at bouldering walls or rides her bike.