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musical genres

body rebus

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Listen Study
How do we talk about the body? To find out how physicality permeates cultural discourse, we compiled a set of songs, poems and religious texts that reference the body.

Using images of the body as pictograms, Listen offers a fresh look at vocabulary use, ranging from the popular to the erudite.

Musical Genres
Based on a compilation of more than 10,000 songs, the piece visualizes the use of words representing body parts in popular culture. Each musical genre exhibits its own characteristic set of words, with more frequently used terms showing up as bigger images. The entrance image shows how many times different body parts are mentioned; the charts for each genre go into more detail, showing the usage of different synonyms for each part.

Body Rebus
Focusing on words that relate to the body, this piece reduces all other terms in a text to gray dots. By keeping the overall shape of the text intact—line breaks are respected—and displaying longer words as larger dots, the viewer is presented with a telegraphic picture of physicality in written language.

Check out our “rebus glossary.” Images depict the parts of the body, with racier terms represented by racier images.

Notes: Some body words have multiple meanings. For example, the word “back” tends to be used more as an adverb and adjective than as a body part. In cases like this, we do not treat the term as a body part; it shows up on the rebus as a gray dot. In addition, we only analyze parts of the body visible to the eye, so words such as "heart" or "blood" are not counted.