Voices of Dissent: A Multimodal Analysis of Protest Songs through Lyrics and Audio

Music has long served as a vehicle for political expression, with protest songs playing a central role in articulating dissent and mobilizing collective action.Yet, despite their cultural significance, the linguistic and acoustic signatures that define protest music remain understudied.We present a multimodal computational analysis of protest and non-protest songs spanning multiple decades.Using NLP and audio analysis, we identify the linguistic and musical features that differentiate protest songs.Instead of focusing on classification performance, we treat classification as a diagnostic tool to investigate these features and reveal broader patterns.Protest songs are not just politically charged; they are acoustically and linguistically distinct, and we quantify how.