This is the Dylanometer. It’s purpose is give songwriters some sense of how similar in style their lyrics are to Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Given that Dylan is considered by many to be the greatest songwriter of the 20th century - his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 attests to his status as a songwriter – many songwriters have based songs and writing styles on his work. The Dylanometer provides a way of testing the lyrics of a song against Dylan’s. Positive similarity scores indicate similarity of the submitted text with Dylan's songs and negative similarity scores indicate lack of similarity between the submitted text and Dylan's songs. The scores generated by the Dylanometer are based on z scores for the Dylan corpus plus 1 (z + 1).
Please note that the Dylanometer uses a computationally intensive method of comparing texts. Therefore, an average song will take approximately 20 seconds to generate a score. This is because a score must be generated for the submitted song in relation to 333 Dylan songs.
Texts submitted for assessment must be between 10 and 1000 words in Length.
I would be interested to hear comments and suggestions in relation to the Dylanometer. Please use the ‘Contact’ details in the footer for any communication.
To use the app, copy and paste the lyrics of the song to be analysed into the text box below and press the 'Submit' button. A score will be generated showing the average similarity between the submitted lyrics and the Dylan corpus as a whole. A table will also be generated showing similarity scores for the given lyrics and each individual song in the Dylan corpus.