Embeddings

Someone promises to change. A few passages later, the person they are addressing replies that the promise is no longer enough. When the expression of commitment returns, we recognize the words, but we now know that someone challenges them. The offer remains; its place in the conversation has changed. That happens in “Puesto Pa’ Ti,” by Maluma featuring Farina. I wanted to read it alongside a declaration of affection that persists in The Beatles and a command that returns after a protest in Metallica. Placing these records together brings three different relationships between repetition and change into view, without assuming which should matter most. ...

I am not here to criticize or praise any particular era. I want to understand what songs mean, explore how they relate to one another through embeddings, and follow how the story they tell unfolds along its narrative arc. Seeing that evolution laid out makes me ask: which feelings endure from one decade to the next? Which values appear, change shape, or take on a different weight? Over the decades, the front line of what worries us has moved, and the move starts with how we perceive the city. Fear, as in the movies, first lived outside our doors, in the street, and ended up as a mantra repeating inside our heads. That shift is what I set out to follow along the narrative arc. This time I follow songs that talk about fear, from the eighties to 2026. I want to see which worries remain and what changes in the way they are told: who is afraid, what they fear, what they value, and how they respond. When I listen to albums, that mix of permanence and change is part of what draws me to following a band’s evolution. Here I try to turn that curiosity into a reading we can test and visualize. ...

Abstract This study traces the lyrical evolution of the Beatles across four albums — Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and Abbey Road (1969) — using a pipeline of LLM-driven topic modeling (BERTopic), a vector database (OpenAI text-embedding-3-large indexed in ChromaDB), embedding geometry, and graph theory. The study puts a falsifiable question to the canonical critical narrative — that the Beatles moved through four discrete stylistic eras — by testing whether the albums occupy separable territories in lyrical-semantic space. ...

A song can change language while continuing an image, a joke, or an argument. It can also stay in one language while changing subject. Aquamosh, by Plastilina Mosh, offers a setting for asking how a similarity-based representation handles those possibilities. The question is narrower than whether a model understands the album: how do thresholded embedding similarities vary with language transitions, and where do they disagree with another model’s reading? What changed in this revision The previous title claimed a falsification of the distributional hypothesis. Its interpretation also treated GPT-4o-mini as equivalent to a human reference and generalized the results to commercial recommendation, moderation, and support systems. Those claims exceed the evidence available from this experiment and are withdrawn. ...

An album can revisit an idea through different words, voices, and images. It can also repeat the same words while changing what those words mean. That makes musical narrative an interesting setting for a measurement question: what does similarity between lyric embeddings actually tell us? The original analysis compared lyrics from Abbey Road and The Dark Side of the Moon. I expected a representation of sustained themes to reflect my reading of Pink Floyd’s album. That expectation is an interpretation to test, not a ground truth against which every different model result must be declared a failure. ...