PCA

TL;DR, ordered by how much I trust each finding Solid: every embedding I tested (6 representations, 8 OpenAI dimension variants) detects that later lyrics stop returning to earlier stanzas. That is mostly the refrain disappearing. Solid, and negative: none of them detects the direction a song takes, or tells apart the songs where readers see an argument. 256 dimensions see what 3,072 see. Strong lead: the band’s topics barely move in 25 years; how it handles them does. Songs with an arc rise from 2 of 34 to 11 of 29. Exploratory: half of those arcs are open: offers and promises the lyric never resolves. Embeddings are good at telling you what a text is about. They are also good at noticing when a text repeats itself. What they lose is the relation between two passages: who does what to whom, in what order, and on what condition. Giving the vector more dimensions does not bring that relation back. ...