Wordle is a neat little tool I discovered over the summer. It takes blocks of text and turns it into a picture highlighting the most commonly used words. More common words appear in larger type. You can input text by copy and paste, by pointing it toward a rss feed, or by giving it a del.icio.us username to analyze. When it is finished, it presents you with an attractive graphic that you can stylize by changing the layout, font and color scheme.

With a few moments to spare this afternoon, I decided to run my iTunes Library through it, to see what words appear most frequently in my song titles. I did this by exporting my library to a tab-separated text file, opening it in a spreadsheet and copying all the song titles into Wordle. In total, it was more than 58 thousand words and it took several moments for my iMac to paste all of them into the Java applet, but I was quite surprise to see Wordle itself chew through the list without any delay.

Below are is the result:

A lot of generic music terms, like ‘title’, ‘mix’ and ‘theme’ as well as a good representation of classical music. If I really wanted a qualitative look, I could always edit out those common words, but for now I think what I have is pretty cool.

Get your own Wordle.

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Side note: Frequent readers may have noticed that my writing frequency has slowed to barely a trickle as of late. The reason being that I’ve re-entered college to pursue a second bachelors degree I’m changing fields. So between a full time job and ten credit hours at a school an hour’s drive away, I find myself with very little time for hobbyist writing. That said, I’m unwilling to completely abandon the site. My output may be at a trickle, but it’ll still there. So keep that feed reader fired up for the occasional return of tunequest.