March 25, 2008

I suspect the rap quiz is suprisingly harder than the rock quiz. Don't know if it's cause Mr. Yeti did better cherry picking, or if it's because the rap songs are so much more lyrically sophisticated. 

I did pretty well on the rap one. The few that I missed were mostly songs that I had either never heard or was vaguely aware of but had never listened to the lyrics.

A few of us were kicking around the rock one last week, and one thing that I thought was kind of neat was to see if there was one word that instantly caused someone to recognize the song.

For instance on #7 on the rock one, the word "colitas" was the trigger for both natedogg and NanoCindy whereas it was "steely" for me.

On the rap one, a few of my triggers were "shaolin" (at least for the artist), "kaopectate", and "anaconda".  

First, thank you mrflip, this is awesome. My college roommate and I used to do lyrics quizzes constantly back when the internets consisted of things like Archie, Veronica, and rec.music.lyrics.

Anyway, my own results to the contrary, I'm going to argue that the raps should actually be easier to figure out: more words overall = more potential for distinctive words, which at least for me are the big tipoffs (scaramouche? anaconda? if you know these lyrics at all, they're dead giveaways).

That said, I got over half of the NYT selections and only 30% of the rap ones... but I'll put it down to just not being as familiar with the songs, or at least the lyrics. First, there were 4 songs on each list that I still couldn't give you a tune for after I knew the answer, but that obviously becomes a large percentage difference. Second, I wouldn't call it lyrical sophistication (not to diss rap; sometimes it certainly is), but lyric delivery that tips it for me. I like Gold Digger, but I'd have to hear that song a lot more times than I have before I absorbed what he was actually saying between choruses. There's a reason everyone knows the lyrics to Baby Got Back, but I bet few less-than-fans could deliver three full non-chorus lines of a Dylan song (I certainly can't -- I got that one by dint of the distinctive words).

I say if you really want a challenge, take a handful of Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston/Celine Dion (ie., crooning love songs) lyrics and see if you can guess which ones are which. (all alone be by heart i love my want we with you...etc ;-)
 

i had the same thought... what about just one-word to guess a song. like natedogg, "colitas" did it for me, but how about "excitations," or even just a letter? "c" did it for me with aretha 

OK, Here are Rap and 80s lyrics fed into the Yahoo Term Extraction API, which identifies Statistically Improbable Phrases from a small corpus.

  1. "shotgun shack", "rocks and stones", "silent water", "bottom of the ocean", "ocean water", "time water", "life time", "automobile", "lifetime", "wheel", "god", "money" - Answer
     
  2. "brotherhood of man", "top of my lungs", "twenty five years", "lying in bed", "deep breath", "single day" - Answer
     
  3. "georgetown hoyas", "left and right brain", "total chaos", "shit creek", "dungeon family", "life game", "favorite group", "bat cave", "yawl", "brougham", "record player", "back of the bus", "nigga", "playas", "hoes", "gypsy", "circles", "fuss", "when in doubt", "ya" - Answer
     
  4. "kind of girl", "tease", "tide", "one number one" - Answer
     
  5. "linens and things", "nice breasts", "gettin head", "venice beach", "witcha", "mad cause", "sippin", "gunplay", "crist", "niggaz", "biggie", "givin", "house of blues", "roscoe", "hoes", "floss", "squirt", "booze", "sess", "bic" - Answer
     
  6. "hookah pipes", "sand dance", "party boys", "donut shop", "walk the line", "waitresses", "crocodiles", "buzzer", "kremlin", "bazaar", "bet", "nile", "domino", "yen", "cigarette", "cadillac", "cops", "paintings", "pose", "punk" - Answer
     
  7. "tight blue jeans", "good vibrations", "new sensation", "stitch in time", "danger zone", "chaperone", "roar", "lion", "worry" - Answer
     
  8. "bum rush", "funky drummer", "heart cause", "freedom of speech", "rednecks", "john wayne", "rollin", "work of art", "brothers and sisters", "sucker", "rhythm", "elvis", "stamps", "heroes", "hero", "fitness", "game", "music" - Answer
     
  9. "milk the cow", "birthday suits", "foot patrol", "lil jon", "homies", "hundred thousand", "ludacris", "pinky", "spit", "chill", "rhythm", "toes", "clothes", "jag", "hell", "truth", "game" - Answer
     
  10. "leper messiah", "spiders from mars", "sweet hands", "beer light", "nazz", "special man", "ziggy", "making love", "snow white", "voodoo", "ego", "bones", "fly", "god", "japan" - Answer
     
  11. "slam bam", "notorious girls", "judgements", "prophets", "bandit", "disguise", "fools", "monkey", "witness", "compromise", "money" - Answer
     
  12. "new emotion", "rain", "tragedy", "memory" - Answer
     
  13. "watusi", "walking down the street", "pony", "trance", "music" - Answer
     
  14. "sleight of hand and twist of fate", "thorn twist", "sleight of hand", "bed of nails", "twist of fate" - Answer
     

 

Looking at this, I think a better contest would be to feed whole albums into the term extraction API... its implementation using Yahoo!- or Ling-Pipes and the LyricWiki API is left as an exercise for the reader. 

Whoa... what happened to the rap one? (I only had time at work to go through the first 7 or 8...I was able to identify the artists rather quickly, but I didn't know which specific songs they were in a case or two.) Anyway, the rap one was super cool and fun so if sending it through email would be easiest, that'd be cool too. 

I am a dope and edited the first (alphabetized) quiz with the contents of the second (term extraction) while proofreading the second... thanks for alerting me! 

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