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.). (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. 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. To combine these two measures, he leaned on an analysis by a fellow data scientist and blogger, Myles Harrison. Next, Thompson used the Genius Lyrics API to examine “lyrical density,” specifically the concentration of “sad words” in any given song. 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). 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.

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.

But the argument would still largely depend on matters of taste and acculturation. I might make a case for them based on lyrical interpretations, musical arrangement, and instrumentation. 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.

Top depressing tech n9ne songs