u/DulcetTone

A few years ago, I was toying with the idea of making a phone app where players would be challenged to demonstrate their knowledge of song lyrics.

I got distracted and never made an app, but not before writing some code to digest and profile lyrics on a song-by-song basis. I started with the Beatles (of course). I thought one easy, and perhaps illuminating view of the songs would be a histogram of words, and how many songs they appeared in. I think I used lyrics.com as my input.

Caveats:

1. there's gonna be slop room on "oh", "ooh" and "you're", "yer" etc.
2. with fade outs, there will be doubt as to what is the last audible word
3. I only did 184 songs written by the Beatles that they released on Beatles albums
4. various verb forms and singular/plural are treated separately. That is "love" and "loves" are separate entries
5. probably a lot more

There were 2291 distinct words used in those 184 songs. 1309 of the 2291 words appear in one song only. 293 appeared in two songs only.

Here are the top ten (the numbers given reflect how many songs each word appears in... not the number of times the word appears - this helps dampen out the fudge).

• 161 "the"
• 160 "to"
• 151 "you"
• 151 "and"
• 142 "i"
• 135 "a"
• 123 "me"
• 108 "that"
• 107 "in"
• 97 "my"

A good question is "What Beatles songs do NOT have the word 'the' or 'to' in them?" ;)

The basis of my never-made game would have centered on the more interesting words, and asking players to name songs that contained a given word in a timed trial and see who came up with more.

For instance:

• Which songs contain "kitchen"? (there are 2)
• Which contain "everywhere"? (8)
• "bag"? (7! WTF?)
• "point"? (3?!)

etc etc.

LMK if there is some other analysis that would intrigue you. If you like, I could post the entire list of how many songs each word appears in.

He wouldn't commit to the bit.

I sing much better when I have good monitoring, but play a lot of open mikes where such can't be assured. Does anyone make a wearable headset that has a stem mike that (locally) feeds a single ear a good signal obtained at the mike?

It's a bonus if the mike's output could go to a sound system, and nice if the monitor signal could come back from the board (as is convention), but I am focused on an entirely local (mike -> ear) system that I could rely on while singing into a house mike or without amplification at all.

Thanks in advance!