Relationships Between Lyrics and Melody in Popular Music

  • Eric Nichols ,
  • Dan Morris ,
  • ,
  • Christopher Raphael

ISMIR 2009 - Proceedings of the 11th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference |

Published by International Society for Music Information Retrieval

Composers of popular music weave lyrics, melody, and instrumentation together to create a consistent and compelling emotional scene. The relationships among these elements are critical to musical communication, and understanding the statistics behind these relationships can contribute to numerous problems in music information retrieval and creativity support. In this paper, we present the results of an observational study on a large symbolic database of popular music; our results identify several patterns in the relationship between lyrics and melody.