"Living in the Limelight
The Universal Dream"

An Online Database Exploration Lesson
for Computer Science Students at
the High School Level

Designed by Matt Moore

matt@mattmoore.net

Introduction | Acquaint | Ask | Arrange | Apply | Evaluation |Credits

Introduction

This popular song by Rush describes a musician's discomfort with being in the limelight after the recent success of his music. The musician describes himself as

"Cast in this unlikely role,
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact
One must put up barriers
To keep oneself intact." (Limelight, 1981)

The musician clearly understands that the limelight can lead in many self destructing paths so he is cautious "to keep himself intact". This musician also understands that he is a role model for many by singing in the last verse that "All the world's indeed a stage and we are merely players."

According to Rush the Limelight is "the Universal Dream". However, after visiting Leo's Lyrics, a database of thousands of popular music lyrics, I found out that only one song in this entire database contains the phrase "The Universal Dream". This led me to conclude that although Rush is singing some very wise lyrics there might be other themes in modern music that make a song popular. Consequently, you are going to investigate common themes in popular music by using this database. After accumulating your data you will create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that analyzes your findings, and then you will write a 200 word paragraph stating your observations, conclusions, and hypotheses about popular music.

Acquaint Yourself

You are going to visit Leo's Lyrics (http://www.leoslyrics.com/) in order to understand how to use this particular database. This database is very user friendly, and it allows you to search by artist, song title, a word, scatter words, or an exact phrase match.

First, write down on a sheet of paper your favorite musical artist, your favorite song, a popular thematic word in songs (such as love, hate, war, etc.), and finally your favorite musical lyric. Then use this searchable database to locate this information. If you find the artist and the song, write "found" after the artist and the song. If you find results for the theme and the lyric, write the number of times those categories occur in the search engine. For example, "Spring" is found 580 times or in 580 songs.

Ask for Information

You are going to compare ten broad categories of musical lyrics. These categories are opposites and are listed as follows.

A. Love and Hate
B. Violence and Peace
C. Offensive Language and Polite Language
D. Patriotic and Nonpatriotic
E. Objects and Ideas

Before you begin searching for the thematic content, you need to make a list in your notebook of all of these categories. Then to the right of the categories, you need to write either three "groups of three descriptive words" or a three "three word phrases" for each of these categories. These descriptive words or phrases are going to be the search terms that you use to find songs in this database. For example, for one of the searches in the love category you could write "rose, kiss, and dance" or simply the phrase "I love you". That would satisfy a search for one of the searches in a category. You would need to have two more search terms or search phrases for each category.

After you have your list (which will have 30 sets of searchable terms), you are ready to use the database to search for the quantity of songs that contain that searchable phrase or those searchable terms. Use the scattered words search for your three terms or use the phrase search for your phrase terms. Finally, record the number of songs that contain these scattered terms or phrases according to the database results.

Arrange the Answers

Your project will contain one Microsoft Excel workbook with one spreadsheet and two graphs.

The spreadsheet will contain the following column headings

• the ten categories listed above
• the search terms or phrases used
• the number of songs that include those search terms
• the percentage of each of these to the lettered category total
  (see combined opposite categories above)

In order to calculate the fourth column you will need to have totals for each of the combined opposite categories listed above. Create those subtotals anywhere upon your spreadsheet but label them properly so it is clear to me where these totals are what they are. As always organize your data / calculations spreadsheet well so that it is easy for an expert to read quickly.

After you have created the spreadsheet and checked your calculations, you will then make a graph of the quantitative results and a second graph of the percentages that you calculated. Choose graph types that illustrate your findings well. Hint: label your series correctly from the beginning.

Apply What You've Learned

The project will also contain a short paragraph typed in Microsoft Word that describes your findings. You need to write a 200 word paragraph that describes your results, findings, conclusions, opinions, and hypotheses. Some questions you may want to answer are:

• Did you learn anything new?
• Were your results consistent with what you previously thought about poplular music?
• What else could be studied with this collection of data?
• Would you need any additional resources to make a new study?
• Where might you find those additional resources?

Refer to the spreadsheet and graphs to support your written work. When your are finished print out your spreadsheet, two graphs, and paragraph. Staple your project together in this order: Paragraph, Spreadsheet, Quantitative Graph, Percentages Graph.

Evaluation

You will be evaluated according to the following checklist.

1 = not acceptable       2 = could be better     3 = acceptable     4 = outstanding

Conclusion

This project helps you organize data from an on-line searchable database, make calculations of that data, and create a well-written response of your findings. You are learning to base statements upon facts and not other opinions or hearsay.

During or after completion of this project, you may also encounter that your classmates had different results. This represents the imperfection of studies like these. However, you should encounter some similarities between your work and that of your classmates which will help you make better conclusions about poplular music.

Finally, you may want to continue this study within the class. Now that we have collected data from individual searches, you can combine the data from several persons' work so that you have more reliable results. For example, you could combine all the individual results from Love and Hate and then do this analysis process again. Do you reach the same conclusions about popular music? Can you reach new conclusions? What are they? and so forth continuing with the similar questions listed above.

If you choose to do this secondary project, please notifiy me of your intentions so that I can approve this project for extra credit.

Credits & References

Rush (Rock Band). (1981). Limelight (from Moving Pictures). Mercury Records. Canada.

The graphic is the actual cover from Moving Pictures.

Leo's Lyrics Database. (2002). On-line Searchable Database. Retreived October 23, 2003 from the World Wide Web: http://www.leoslyrics.com/

Microsoft Products : Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.

We all benefit by being generous with our work. Permission is hereby granted for other educators to copy this lesson, update or otherwise modify it, and post it elsewhere provided that the original author's name is retained along with a link back to the original URL of this lesson. On the line after the original author's name, you may add Modified by (your name) on (date). If you do modify it, please let me know and provide the new URL.

Last updated on October 23, 2003. Based on a template from EDTEC 570