a cold tonight actually maybe could I
get a little bit of pity from the
audience maybe an hour thank you but you
didn’t really mean that did you and
that’s I want to talk a little bit about
that the difference between kind of what
we show on the outside and how we’re
actually feeling on the inside and in
fact how in many ways we live two lives
the life that we see on the outside and
the life the way we’re really feeling
and maybe how technology can help us to
understand people’s inner lives a little
bit better so to explain more of that
idea I’d like to use an example of
someone whose inner life I’m very
familiar with which is myself so this is
how maybe people on the outside saw my
positivity from of my adult life from
the age of 1988 from the Year 1988 when
I was 18 and I started a college up to
the present day so I started a college
and everything seemed to be going pretty
well people thought I was a little bit
nervous and I toddled along as far as
they could tell everything seemed fine
and then they began to pick up there was
something wrong with me and it was I was
drinking too much and it was more than
that if I was developing a drink problem
and this got so bad that I had to leave
University temporarily and I I went back
to my hometown and I stopped drinking
and this had a profound effect on my
life and everyone around me could see
that and I got into mindfulness and
spirituality and everything seemed to be
on the up from then on I I got my degree
I got a PhD I went to work on Wall
Street I joined a start-up and then it
all peaked in 2006 2007 when I have my
most responsible and highest paying job
and then I decided to leave that and
take a job for the course of the salary
in academia and of course everyone
thought well that’s a bit of drop in
there in positivity there and things
have got a little bit better since then
as far as people are concerned so there
you go that’s my adult life
but of course it’s not it’s it’s not
what I felt over that period if we look
here at the thick line that’s how I was
feeling that’s a much closer in a
feeling world to what I was experiencing
and as soon as I got to college my
drinking became too much
III plummeted into the depths of misery
really very very fast it was chronic
alcoholism and when I was at the bottom
of it in 1993 I felt worse than anyone
could have imagined but then when I
sorted out my life and stopped drinking
with the mindfulness and the
spirituality it had a profound effect on
me at times I felt ecstatic with
happiness and then the strangest thing
happened what everyone else thought my
life was going better and better I
slowly got more and more obsessed with
money and prestige and my inner
contentment dropped until I decided to
take that 75 percent drop in salary and
came into academia and then things just
took off and I was I got a creative job
and I was as much happier as things have
just got better since then this is not
so uncommon I mean not everybody drops
into chronic alcoholism obviously but
this split between the inside and the
outside is not some common who wants to
admit when their their their life seems
really successful that they’re miserable
who wants to tell their friends that the
seemingly perfect relationship is
actually a sham we we we do hide these
things from people and you know maybe if
you could follow someone 24 hours a day
and look at their body language and the
sort of things they were saying and
their facial expressions you could get a
sense of what’s going on inside but of
course we can’t do that or maybe even
famous people who are in the public eye
frequently that many of them have PR
agencies who try to avoid this this
emotional leakage for them deliberately
however there is one type of person
famous person who almost prides
themselves in showing their weaknesses
in expressing themselves and the truth
about their feelings these are artists
and musicians in the work that they do
in fact some of the work of these
artists is almost like a free
association they open up their
unconscious and their feelings and and
therapists would be proud of some of the
self revelation that goes on in works of
art and in fact some artists use music
and art as a form of therapy and and use
it to try and bring their inner demons
to light to help themselves
and one of the first people to do this
was one of the most successful
songwriters of all time John Lennon who
was a member of the Beatles he released
an album imagine where he in 1971 that
revealed a lot of his inner demons to
people and we thought we had a think
about this about artists and musicians
and particularly John Lennon could we
analyze the artistic output of these
people to find out maybe what was going
on behind the the veneer that you would
see in public now I don’t know if any of
you have seen any interviews of
songwriters but often their most famous
songs were written in just 15 minutes
that just gushed out an emotional
expression so we we looked at the lyrics
of John Lennon and we wanted to analyze
these there’s a lot of lyrics obviously
and we want to try and analyze them in
an objective way rather than going
through and subjectively looking at them
and it just so happens that there is a
way of doing that and it’s first of all
it’s based on word spotting here’s a
couple of John Lennon’s most famous
songs an early song I feel fine it’s
just a few phrases from the song now
that’s a very positive song and look at
some of the words that appear in there
good happy love fine and a much later
song of his jealous guy which is a
beautiful song but I don’t think anyone
would necessarily call it a positive
song in an explicit sense if you look at
the words their lose her to cry jealous
insecure shivering there’s a clear
difference between these but how can you
quantify this well thankfully scientists
have done a lot of the hard work in this
job for us already
they’ve taken a list of almost 15,000
words and they’ve asked people large
numbers of people for each word they’ve
said give this word a score of
positivity between one and ten this is
an approximate thing obviously and
everyone has their opinion but when you
do this with a large enough number of
people you start to see patterns and
some words be much more positive than
other words and I think our intuition
matches this so we took this list of
words about 15,000 English words we took
150 John Lennon songs and for each year
that John Lennon was actively releasing
music whether solo or with the Beatles
that was from 1963 up to his tragic
assassination in 1980 so in 1963 the
first year we would we looked at all of
his lyrics we looked at the positivity
value of every word we could find in
there that we had a positivity value for
and we averaged it we didn’t save 64 65
and so on and when we smoothed out to
look at the general trends we did see a
fascinating pattern that belied the PR
that he would have had at the time so
what I’ve done here is the thick graph
the thick line is what the lyric
positivity tells us and the thin line in
the background is kind of what people
would have thought outside you know John
Lennon’s inner circle so you can see at
the beginning the Beatles took off
everyone was happy great news but then
as the Beatles got more and more famous
more and more money more more prestige
vastly respected John Lennon’s lyric
positivity
plummeted in the mid-60s he really you
know if they were an expression of his
happiness he was not happy man at the
peak of the Beatles climbed to
popularity and in fact we found out
years later after he left Beatles he
admitted that this was a traumatic time
for him he said that one of the
principal reasons was a big divide
between his public face and his private
face and it doesn’t actually take a
computer algorithm to look at a song
like help with an exclamation mark you
look at those lyrics
but the thing is it was set to a papi
tune and they are all up there come
doing their heads like this you know it
all looked happy but it he was not a
happy guy another interesting thing
after John Lennon left the Beatles all
the Beatles split up he talked about how
the freedom he felt I feel so free I’m
no longer tied down the truth was well
if we look at his lyrical positivity it
goes down again and in fact once again
we find out later that Lennon was having
tremendous problems with heroin
addiction and the dream relationship he
had with Yoko Ono who many of you will
have heard of was in fact having
terrible problems and they split up for
a while in the seventies in fact so this
is a little bit about this tells us
maybe the lyric positivity can give us
some insights into what’s going on
behind an artists public a public image
however what’s fascinating about John
Lennon is that he did at least 2/3 of
his most productive work with probably
the most successful songwriter of all
time Paul McCartney and in fact some
people say that Paul McCartney is a
better songwriter than John Lennon and
and that we’ll be whistling his tunes
more in 50 years but whatever your
feelings about it they had a profound
influence on each other so we wanted to
see can we learn something about their
relationship using this method we took
hundred fifty of Paul’s songs and we ran
it through the algorithm and what did we
see well first of all what I have to do
is I have to compress there the graph to
make space for maca because this is what
matters positivity looks like I mean
what a happy guy compared to Lennon in
terms of his in terms of his lyrical
positivity in fact the only time he
comes close to the negativity of the
relative negativity of Lennon’s lyrics
was during that time in the 60s when
perhaps he was being pressured a lot to
take LSD he didn’t want to take LSD they
were pressuring him to do it it wasn’t
his kind of thing truth be told and
they’d also stopped gigging towards this
time and McCartney was was well into his
gigging he loved playing live so that
may explain to a degree why that
negativity happens there another
interesting difference in Lennon and
McCartney well obviously the the
splitter the Beatles was a major turning
point for them and despite all of
Lennon’s protestations of freedom and
its McCartney who seems to have been
freed up by that change his lyrical
positivity has just gone up and in fact
I’ll tell you what this actually
represents to me McCartney was a more
integrated character right from the
beginning Lennon had terrible demons and
he only knows Lennon’s biographical
history he had a very difficult
childhood he was he was he really had a
very badly integrated personality and
but McCartney was just a more normal guy
and it meant that he could plan and make
wings a proper band that took off in the
70s he settled down better with Lindy
didn’t have all the chaos that that John
Lennon had with Yoko Ono it was it was
all it was all it was well there is one
little thing though what happened in the
late 70s to McCartney if anyone can tell
me that be great
because we don’t really know why there’s
that dip in the lyric positivity was it
because the wings albums weren’t doing
so great was it because of the stress
that was going on in the band at the
time we’re not sure so if you’ve got any
ideas please do do let me know now I am
a huge Beatles fan I’m a huge Lennon fan
and I’m a huge McCartney fan and when I
saw this graph emerge I felt immediately
inspired to me this represents something
very beautiful these songwriters when my
father first played me that that one of
the most iconic pop albums of all time
sergeant pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band when I was a young teenager it blew
me away and ever since then these people
that blow me away so to see this graph
sent me thinking I want to express this
not just by publishing an academic paper
I want to express this in some other way
and luckily I’m a composer so what I did
was I wrote a piece of classical music
that involved a soprano and the tenor
the soprano represents John Lennon and
the tenor represents Paul McCartney and
I wrote this duet in a classical idiom
and afterwards I was about thirty
seconds a year so for every 30 so the
first 30 seconds was 1963 in music in
1964 and then what I did is I I took the
grass and I imposed them on the music so
for 1963 where he had very high lyrical
positivity for McCartney I would shove
the tunes I’d written for 1963 for the
tenor right to the top of the tenors
range and for the years where Lennon had
a low positivity I’d shove his tunes the
soprano down to the bottom of the range
this was a very painful process actually
because it was sticking a machine in the
middle of my composition process but we
were very happy with how it turned out
so I’m going to play an excerpt in a
minute but I just like to finish with
this for I do some of the great figures
of the last 200 years have left tens of
thousands if not hundreds of thousands
of words available and with modern
computer scanning technology and the
science of emotion analysis we have an
opportunity here to perform large health
psychology and history or many of these
people and I think this is a tremendous
opportunity that I hope we fully take
advantage of and to finish off I will
sonification of Lennon and McCartney
thank you [Applause]