Subliminal Messages Part 2: Letter Frequency Composition

This essay shows the subliminal harmonies and dissonances between letter frequency distribution across Shakespeare’s Sonnets and compares them with those of the verses on Eminem’s Recovery album. The concept of harmony and dissonance as it relates to letter frequency will be made clearer through use of graphs in which the average use of each letter per verse is presented. The verses from each author’s respective works are compared to the other verses in the order in which they were published, which is important as the harmonies and dissonances phenomenon can span multiple verses in a row and were most likely not intentionally organized this way consciously. In the future, people may want to have a professional linguist analyze everything from political speeches to movies, music albums, and books, to maximize the overall aesthetic effect of language in the subliminal dimension of letter frequency as it is presented in this essay.

If you look at figure 1, you will see a chart of the vowels as they are used in each of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a percent of total letters used in each sonnet. Of note is the stratification between the first level, letter E, the second level, letters A, I, and O, and the third level, letters U and Y with letter Y being considered always a vowel in computer analysis of the letters. This stratification is sometimes harmonic in that you can see it distinctly for as much as 10-15 sonnets in a row, and is sometimes dissonant in that the second and third levels jumble together also for as much as 10-15 sonnets in a row. This can also be referred to in the mathematical sense as a phase space, because we are not yet sure as to whether they are actually harmonic and dissonant sounding to the ears. All we know so far is that there is a clear distinction for multiple sonnets in a row.

This study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets shows us what we are looking for in figure 2, the same data for Eminem’s Recovery album. This time the stratification is different, with the harmonies less easily seen until closer to the end of the album, though they are also noticeable earlier on if you know what you are looking for (a 3 level stratification as described in the last paragraph). Interestingly, the dissonances are jumbled differently in Eminem’s verses with the 2nd level merging up with the 1rst level instead of down with the 3rd level as in the sonnets. We are looking here at two completely different styles of composition that remain mostly consistent in how they differ throughout the body of work, but the harmonies in the two respective bodies of work are of the same stratification.

In composition, it’s not that a dissonance is undesirable, in fact the areas of dissonance can make the areas of harmony more powerful and vice versa. We see in Eminem’s album composition slight harmonies towards the beginning in verses (8-13) and (16-18) that build to more powerful harmonies towards the end (21-22, 25-26, 28, 31-32, 38-39, 42, and 44). Most of his singles are in the latter half of the album. In fact, of his four singles, the two that became number 1 hits on the billboard hot 100 chart follow the same pattern of dissonance in two verses followed by a harmonic verse. These are Not Afraid (19-21) and Love the Way You Lie (40-42) on figure 2. His other singles are Space Bound (27-29) which has a dissonance harmony dissonance structure and No Love (25-26) which arguably has a harmony harmony structure. The album ends on a harmonic tone.

This is just an initial investigation looking at results that could possibly be noticed subconsciously as they appear subconsciously organized in entire bodies of work. For this reason the general trends of stratification are what we are primarily interested in, though it may be worth further study to see how much and to what level of detail these trends can be picked up on a subconscious level. This investigation of how vowels are stratified by frequency shows us that the organization of letter frequency by harmony and dissonance is a real phenomenon with practical application and deserves further attention.

Fig 1 (click to enlarge) 

Fig 2 (click to enlarge)