The study focussed in part on function words, the heavy-lifting but unglamorous class that includes pronouns, articles, and prepositions—“I,” “you,” “the,” “a,” “an,” “on,” “in,” “under.” As Pennebaker has written, there are only about four hundred and fifty of them in English, but they account for fifty-five per cent of the words that we use, the linguistic glue that holds everything together but goes mostly unnoticed. “We can’t hear them,” Pennebaker told me recently. “You and I have now been talking for ten minutes, and you have no idea if I’ve used articles at a high rate or a low rate. I have no idea.” Everyone has a pattern, though, ..
.. Indeed, as Maria Konnikova reported in March, function-word patterns and other metrics may be able to establish not only an author’s voice but also her disposition and mood.
.. But Gary Taylor, an editor of the complete Oxford Shakespeare, sees something more than academic principle at play. “Many great writers and literary critics chose to concentrate on English because they hated math,” he told me.
The Shazam Effect: The Music is Listening to Us
Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business—but is it bad for music?
.. Last year, Shazam released an interactive map overlaid with its search data, allowing users to zoom in on cities around the world and look up the most Shazam’d songs in São Paulo, Mumbai, or New York. The map amounts to a real-time seismograph of the world’s most popular new music, helping scouts discover unsigned artists just as they’re starting to set off tremors.
.. “We know where a song’s popularity starts, and we can watch it spread,” Titus told me.
.. Shazam has become a favorite app of music agents around the country, and in February, the company announced that it would get into the music-making business itself ..
.. some artists look for patterns in Pandora streaming to figure out which songs to play at each stop on a tour.
.. But data about our preferences have shifted the balance of power, replacing experts’ instincts with the wisdom of the crowd. As a result, labels have gotten much better at understanding what we want to listen to.
.. Republic Records is the most data-driven major label in the music business
in 1991, Billboard switched from DJ-reported to Sales Data and Hiphop and Country Soared.
In music, people want comfort food