Analysis of Arabic Songs: Abdel ElHalim as a Case Study

Walid Gomaa

Abstract: Recently there has been a great deal of interest in computationally studying and investigating musicals. This has been fostered by recent advances in computational power, computational paradigms, analytics, and algorithms. Arabic is spoken by more than 400 million speakers and it is one of the most used languages over the Internet. Over the last decade, Arabic, its varieties, and dialects have begun to gain ground in the area of research within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities. In this work we initiate the study of Arabic songs and their lyrics. We start by studying the career work of one of the most famous and influential singers in Egypt and the Arab World during the 20th century, namely, Abdel ElHalim Hafez ( ). We use data analysis tools in order to shed light into the artist’s career. The work of Abdel ElHalim is very diverse including a wide range of genres from romanticism, nationalism, spiritual religion, etc. In order to celebrate this inspiring and diverse body of work, we will explore and analyze the general characteristics of his work including composers and lyricists with whom he had been working.