The 10 Most Depressing Radiohead Songs According to Data Science: Hear the Songs That Ranked Highest in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

One of my favorite music-themed com­e­dy sketch­es of recent years fea­tures a sup­port group of Radio­head fans flum­moxed and dis­ap­point­ed by the band’s post-Ok Com­put­er out­put. The sce­nario trades on the per­plex­i­ty that met Radio­head­’s abrupt change of musi­cal direc­tion with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Kid A as well as on the fact that Radio­head fans tend toward, well… if not PTSD or severe mood dis­or­ders, at least a height­ened propen­si­ty for gen­er­al­ized depres­sion.

“Much of Radiohead’s music is unde­ni­ably sad,” writes Ana­lyt­ics Spe­cial­ist and Radio­head fan Char­lie Thomp­son. Rather than play some­thing “less depress­ing,” how­ev­er, as many an acquain­tance has asked him over the years, Thomp­son decid­ed “to quan­ti­fy that sad­ness, con­clud­ing in a data-dri­ven deter­mi­na­tion of their most depress­ing song.”

Now, pure­ly sub­jec­tive­ly, I’d place “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” in the top spot, fol­lowed close­ly by Amne­sia’s “Pyra­mid Song.” But my own asso­ci­a­tions with these songs are per­son­al and per­haps some­what arbi­trary. I might make a case for them based on lyri­cal inter­pre­ta­tions, musi­cal arrange­ment, and instru­men­ta­tion. But the argu­ment would still large­ly depend on mat­ters of taste and accul­tur­a­tion.

Thomp­son, on the oth­er hand, believes in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment.” To that end, he cre­at­ed a “gloom index,” which he used to mea­sure each song in the band’s cat­a­log. Rather than lis­ten­ing to them all, one after anoth­er, he relied on data from two online ser­vices, first pulling “detailed audio sta­tis­tics” from Spotify’s Web API. One met­ric in par­tic­u­lar, called “valence,” mea­sures a song’s “pos­i­tiv­i­ty.” These scores pro­vide an index “of how sad a song sounds from a musi­cal per­spec­tive.” (It’s not entire­ly clear what the cri­te­ria are for these scores).

Next, Thomp­son used the Genius Lyrics API to exam­ine “lyri­cal den­si­ty,” specif­i­cal­ly the con­cen­tra­tion of “sad words” in any giv­en song. To com­bine these two mea­sures, he leaned on an analy­sis by a fel­low data sci­en­tist and blog­ger, Myles Har­ri­son. You can see his result­ing for­mu­la for the “Gloom Index” above, and if you under­stand the pro­gram­ing lan­guage R, you can see exam­ples of his analy­sis at his blog, RChar­lie. (Read a less data-laden sum­ma­ry of Thompson’s study at the ana­lyt­ics blog Rev­o­lu­tions.) Thomp­son also plot­ted sad­ness by album, in the inter­ac­tive graph fur­ther up.

So, which song rat­ed high­est on the “Gloom Scale”? Well, it’s “True Love Waits” from their most recent album A Moon Shaped Pool (hear a live acoustic ver­sion up above.). It’s a damned sad song, I’ll grant, as are the nine run­ners-up, all of which you can hear in the YouTube and Spo­ti­fy playlists above). “Pyra­mid Song” appears at num­ber 5, but “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” doesn’t even rank in the top ten. From a pure­ly sub­jec­tive stand­point, this makes me sus­pi­cious of the whole oper­a­tion. But you tell us, read­ers, what do you think of Thomp­son’s exper­i­ment in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment” in music?

Here’s the top 10:

1. True Love Waits
2. Give Up The Ghost
3. Motion Pic­ture Sound­track
4. Let Down
5. Pyra­mid Song
6. Exit Music (For a Film)
7. Dol­lars & Cents
8. High And Dry
9. Tin­ker Tai­lor Sol­dier …
10. Video­tape

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiohead’s “Creep” Played on the Gayageum, a Kore­an Instru­ment Dat­ing Back to the 6th Cen­tu­ry

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

A Free Course on Machine Learn­ing & Data Sci­ence from Cal­tech

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness