Recognizing Language and Emotional Tone from Music Lyrics Using IBM Watson Tone Analyzer

Abstract

Music has a soothing impact on listener's mood and emotional states. Apart from the rhythm, sequence, instrumental effects on a song, lyrics could be considered as the most vital element. Lyricists' mood and affection towards a song while writing could be understand from the lyrics. Lyrics does have the elements of fictions such as language tone, language style, diction and voice are well maintained in music lyrics. Understanding the tone of a song both language and emotional tones are essential to develop different interactive applications. Music players, video repositories, video sharing sites could use the understandings to recommend next song to play according to the music interest or mood of the listeners. In this paper, we have investigated the possibilities to use IBM Watson Tone Analyzer, an API service to analyze language and emotional tones from song lyrics. We have extracted the features from a 300 English song dataset using the supported API service and formulated a machine learning methodology to classify the language tone (analytical, confident and tentative) and emotional tone (anger, fear, joy and sadness). For classification, we have applied different classifiers including Naïve Bayes, decision tree, random forest, sequential minimal optimization and simple logistic regression.