Building upon my artist lyrics analyzer project, I made a small web app that searches artist lyrics for the colors that they mention in their songs.
You can try it yourself here. < outdated – check out the ol’ repo here
The web “app” works by finding the artist you search for, and running through every lyric it can find by the artist to develop a color palette. Once that palette is built, you can click on any of the boxes to change the background palette and see more detailed statistics about it.
Some notes about the data being used and how it is processed:
- The app looks strictly for web colors, and directly route that color to D3 as the fill. For some reason, fancier colors like “copper” and “rose” do not fill correctly and appear as black.
- The artist search is dumb/brutal. It just queries the artist name and takes the first result it sees. For example, artists such as Drake, Lil Purp, The Beatles, and Selena Gomez don’t produce ideal results.
- The API only provides the first 30% of each song’s lyrics. While this is probably enough for a representative sample, it is not all of the lyrics.
- If a word is added to a lexicon that happens to be a native javascript function (e.g. pop, slice, append) the word will not register properly in the dictionary and won’t be counted.