RAISE A SUILEN (shortened as RAS) is a band in the BanG Dream! franchise (shortened as Bandori) consisting of five female musicians. They were initially formed as THE THIRD to perform songs from Bandori bands that do not play their own instruments (those being Afterglow, Pastel*Palettes and Hello, Happy World!). However, they have evolved to become their own separate live band where they now also perform their own songs. RAS also appears in the second season of the BanG Dream! anime series, where the band members play as characters that form a band to compete against Roselia, another Bandori live band.

I was first interested in RAS’ songs when I glanced that their lyrics tended to have a rebellious theme. From there, I was interested in finding out the predominant sentiments and emotions contained in RAS’ songs and how they compared to songs from other Bandori bands. This blog post describes how that was achieved with sentiment analysis: the process of identifying an author’s sentiments and emotions from text.

Brief methodology

A full methodology of importing and cleaning lyrics and downstream analyses are contained in a subsequent methodology blog post (https://activeevaluator.com/bandori-sentiment-method/). In brief, English translations of original songs for each band were copied from the Bandori fandom website (https://bandori.wikia.com/wiki/BanG_Dream!_Wikia) and pasted into separate .txt files in one folder. The .txt files of the English-translated songs were later imported into R. The lyrics were then cleaned to remove any punctuation, abbreviations, contractions and common and band-specific stopwords (defined as commonly-used words that do not add meaning to text analyses). Once the lyrics were cleaned, I generated a word frequency table counting the number of times a word appeared in each song. The word frequency table was then matched to known sentiment and emotion words from the “bing” and “nrc” sentiment lexicons respectively to calculate the proportion of words under a specific sentiment or emotion for each band.

Exploratory Data Analysis

## # A tibble: 6 x 3
##   band                num_songs num_words
##   <chr>                   <int>     <dbl>
## 1 Afterglow                   8       900
## 2 Hello, Happy World!         7       653
## 3 Pastel*Palettes             8       690
## 4 Poppin'Party               30      3255
## 5 RAISE A SUILEN              4       462
## 6 Roselia                    18      1939

Poppin’Party and Roselia, two well-established live bands in the Bandori franchise, have the most number of songs and consequently the highest number of words in their lyrics. In contrast, given that RAS was only established last year, it is not surprising that they only have four songs so far. Hence, the results of sentiment analyses for RAS may change as English translations of new RAS songs are released.

The wordcloud above gives a visualisation of which words appear most often in Bandori songs with grey, yellow and red words representing increasing word frequencies. The most frequent words tend to relate to positive nouns such as smile, love and dream. In particular, dream was used very often in Bandori songs, particularly the lyrics of Poppin’Party.

Bing sentiment analysis

The “bing” sentiment lexicon is a dictionary of words that are grouped into either “positive” or “negative” sentiments. Initially conceived by Bing Liu and collaborators (Hu & Liu, 2004), this dictionary was built from a small group of adjectives with known sentiments that were used to predict the sentiments of other adjectives and nouns. The end-result is a dictionary containing words that are either labelled “positive” or “negative”. I used the “bing” sentiment lexicon to calculate the proportion of words in each band that were either positive or negative.

## # A tibble: 6 x 7
##   band                num_songs negative positive total prop_pos p_value
##   <chr>                   <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl> <dbl>    <dbl>   <dbl>
## 1 Afterglow                   8      126      104   230    0.452   0.166
## 2 Hello, Happy World!         7       41      138   179    0.771   0    
## 3 Pastel*Palettes             8       79      115   194    0.593   0.012
## 4 Poppin'Party               30      170      359   529    0.679   0    
## 5 RAISE A SUILEN              4       74       64   138    0.464   0.444
## 6 Roselia                    18      221      268   489    0.548   0.037

Similar to Afterglow’s songs, RAS’ songs have an approximately equal number of positive- and negative-associated words. For both bands, there was no statistically-significant deviation from the 50% positive sentiment null result (p > 0.05 via Test of Equal Proportions). To note, Roselia’s songs had significantly more positive words than negative words, though the difference in proportions between the two groups is quite small (p = 0.037 via Test of Equal Proportions, 95% confidence interval = (50.3%, 59.3%)). In contrast, the lyrics of the other three bands (Hello, Happy World!, Pastel*Palettes and Poppin’Party) have significantly and relatively more positive-associated than negative-associated words in their lyrics (p < 0.05 via Test of Equal Proportions).

## # A tibble: 6 x 4
##   band                positive neutral negative
##   <chr>                  <dbl>   <dbl>    <dbl>
## 1 Afterglow                  4       0        4
## 2 Hello, Happy World!        6       0        1
## 3 Pastel*Palettes            7       0        1
## 4 Poppin'Party              22       5        3
## 5 RAISE A SUILEN             1       1        2
## 6 Roselia                   10       5        3

I also used the “bing” sentiment lexicon to count the number of songs for each band that had a “negative”, “neutral” or “positive” overall sentiment. A song with “positive” overall sentiment was defined as a song with more positive words than negative. This was reversed in a song that had a “negative” overall sentiment. From these analyses, four out of six Bandori bands had more songs that were positive overall while Afterglow had an equal number of positive and negative songs. In contrast, RAS had more songs that are negative overall than positive songs.

These results indicate that RAS’ songs are less positive overall than songs from other bands. The limitation of the “bing” sentiment lexicon is that it is only able to distinguish “positive” and “negative” sentiments; it is unable to identify specific emotions contained within the lyrics. An alternative sentiment lexicon would need to be used to probe this result further.

NRC sentiment analysis

The “nrc” sentiment lexicon was conceived by Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney to group words into positive and negative sentiments and eight primary emotions: anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise and trust (Mohammad and Turney, 2010). The dictionary was built by crowdsourcing where people sorted the terms into a sentiment and one or more primary emotions. The NRC sentiment lexicon was used in my analysis to identify the predominant emotions contained within each band’s songs.

The NRC sentiment analysis results are interesting. RAS’ songs tended to have a higher proportion of words that are associated with negative emotions, namely anger and fear. RAS’ songs also had a lower proportion of words associated with positive emotions such as joy and trust. Taken together, these results show that RAS’ songs are geared more towards negative emotions than positive ones which seem to conform to RAS’ themes of mistrust and rebellion.

How do sentiment analysis results relate to the overall themes of songs?

In the Bandori universe, Afterglow, RAS and Roselia are three rock bands that were formed under different circumstances. Afterglow was formed by a group of friends as a way to stay together while Roselia was formed with dreams of making it to the “Future World Festival”, a high-level rock music festival. In contrast to these two bands, RAS was formed as a rival band to Roselia with ambitions to beat them. The sentiment analysis results match the bands’ ambitions and themes which are reflected in the lyrics of their songs.

A predominant theme in Afterglow’s and Roselia’s songs is the positive influence friendship brings to a group. Both bands have lyrics with a lot of words relating to joy and trust which can be driven by friendship. For Afterglow, friendship keeps the band members together which allows them to create memories and influence each other positively. These can be seen in some of their songs such as COMIC PANIC and Jamboree! Journey! where the band members enjoy being together to create new experiences such as creating a manga or going out.

The power of friendship is also evident in Roselia’s songs. Some of their songs tend to show a thankful tone to a specific person. This can be seen in their song Kiseki, where the singer thanks one of their band members for what they have contributed to the band. They call out that despite going down separate paths, they promise to keep in touch while they move forward. This reciprocality of support among band members is less prevalent in RAS’ songs which tend to be more self-centred. This can be seen in their song UNSTOPPABLE, where the singer is merely using the other person to ramble on their negative thoughts towards the other person without being considerate. This is reflected in sentiment analyses of their songs which show a reduced association to trust and an increased association to anger.

How they go about changing themselves is another point of difference among the three bands. The power of friendship in Roselia’s songs can also be used as a positive influence to change someone’s perspective on life. A prime example of this is Re:Birth Day, where the singer initially expresses her despair of being left alone. However, she is not only soothed by the support of the other band members but she also encourages the other band members to move forward. Personal change is also explored in Afterglow’s songs with a prime example being That is How I Roll!. In this song, the need for personal change is driven by a realisation that doing nothing will not change anything. This realisation is what drives the singer to change to become a better person.

In contrast, RAS’s songs have the tendency of the need to push themselves to breaking point to change as quickly as possible. This is driven by the sense of fear that they will not stand out if they do not change. Little joy comes out during this process. This can be seen in their song EXPOSE “Burn Out!!!”, where the need to change is driven by a sense of fear. The reader is pushed to change out of anger and impulse and to let out their emotions. This theme can be seen in sentiment analyses of their songs with a higher proportion of words associated with fear and anger compared to other bands.

Conclusion

Sentiment and text analyses of the Bandori songs both show that RAS’ songs tend to be more negative compared to those from other bands. Their songs tend to show a sense of anger and mistrust towards other people, something that is at odds with the power of friendship shown in the lyrics of other bands. Given that RAS will release new songs in mid-June 2019, it would be interesting to see whether they maintain the same sentiments and emotions from their earlier songs. Nevertheless, sentiment analysis of song lyrics can be used to delve into the sentiments and emotions of the bands which can be matched to the overall themes of their songs.

Bibliography

Hu, M., and Liu, B. (2004). Mining and summarizing customer reviews. In Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (Seattle, WA, USA, ACM), pp. 168-177.

Mohammad, S.M., and Turney, P.D. (2010). Emotions evoked by common words and phrases: using mechanical turk to create an emotion lexicon. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text (Los Angeles, California, Association for Computational Linguistics), pp. 26-34.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the following people who have translated the original Bandori songs from Japanese to English:

• AERIN
• Aletheia
• Arislation
• Betasaihara
• BlaZofgold
• bluepenguin
• Choocolatiah
• Eureka
• Hikari
• Komichi
• Leephysic
• Leoutoeisen
• LuciaHunter
• lunaamatista
• MijukuNine
• Ohoyododesu
• PocketLink
• Rolling
• Starlogakemi
• Thaerin
• Tsushimayohane
• UnBound
• vaniiah
• Youraim

I may have missed other people who have translated songs for this analysis, but I thank you all the same.