How much and how weather influences pop music?

Who knows if the Supertramp song It’s raining again is one of the 759 English- language songs that a team of scientists have analyzed to investigate the relations between weather and pop music? Karen Aplin, a scientist at the University of Oxford Department of Physics with a PhD in experimental atmospheric physics and a diploma in music performance from the Trinity College of London, was at the EOS7 Earth Science and Art session at the EGU in Vienna last April to share with us the results of a study conducted with Sally Brown and other colleagues. With the typical english humor, Karen Aplin has shown the details of a study that has identified 759 song, 419 of which were chosen from a free karaoke data base.

Among the interesting results, 900 singers and songwriters are associated with weather related songs. 30 artists, lyricist or singers were found with weather related names. An expected results is that rain and sun were the most common weather types portrayed. Lyrics analysis showed that words link weather to certain emotions e.g. love and relationships, with sun almost always representing positive feelings. Another interesting result was the relation found between weather related events and weather in songs. For instance, bad weather was significantly more likely to appear in pop songs in the stormy 1950s and 1960s than in the 1970s and 1980s. A good examples come from one of the case studies: Lennon and Mc Cartney. “Here Comes The Sun” was written in April 1969 on the day of “the first sunshine of the year” (Turner, 1999). April 1969 had 189 hours of sunshine, a record that was not surpassed until 1984 (Rowley, 2013).

Other interesting data came from the comparison between a former analoguous study performed on Classical orchestral music (Aplin and Williams 2011, 2012) and the present study on pop music, that is in press in the the scientific journal Weather.

References:

S. Brown et al, Is there a rhythm of the rain? An analysis of weather in popular music, Weather, in press (2015)

For the whole presentation go to the EGU 2015 EOS 7 session Orals