Citation

Kolchinsky A, Dhande N, Park K, Ahn YY. R. Soc. Open Sci. 2017; 4(11): e170952.

Affiliation

Department of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Royal Society Publishing)

DOI

10.1098/rsos.170952

PMID

29291089

PMCID

PMC5717663

Abstract

We investigate the association between musical chords and lyrics by analysing a large dataset of user-contributed guitar tablatures. Motivated by the idea that the emotional content of chords is reflected in the words used in corresponding lyrics, we analyse associations between lyrics and chord categories. We also examine the usage patterns of chords and lyrics in different musical genres, historical eras and geographical regions. Our overall results confirm a previously known association between Major chords and positive valence. We also report a wide variation in this association across regions, genres and eras. Our results suggest possible existence of different emotional associations for other types of chords.

Language: en

Keywords

musicology; sentiment analysis; text analysis