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Elision and Enjamb--ment in Musical Lyrics:Â
A Systematic Analysis of Text-Music Organization in Art and Popular Song
Nat Condit-Schultz
McGill University
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Born To Be Wild (Steppenwolf, 1968)
"Hanging conjunction"
Come Together (The Beatles, 1969)
Music and Lyrics
Text setting
Rhythmic alignmentSound qualitySemantic/emotional content
(word painting)
Form/Structure
(pronounciation)
(syllabic, melismatic, etc.)
Melody
Rhythm, Pitch
Prosody
Rhythm, Pitch
Syntax
Word classes
Poetics
Rhythm, Orthography
Rhyme
Lyin' Eyes (The Eagles, 1975)
I
IV
ii
V
I
IV
ii
V
I
I
IV
ii
V
I
IV
ii
V
I
I
IV
ii
V
I
IV
ii
V
I
Music-Syntax Segment Relationships
Alignment
Division
Enjambment
Duration
Resolution
Repetition
Repeat fill
False start
Stutter
Â
"Jump" enjambment
"Drag" enjambment
.
B.O.B. (OutKast, 2000)
In My Room (The Beach Boys, 1963)
Interval
Grouping
Period PhraseSub-phraseGestureMotiveNote
UtteranceIntonational phr.Phonological phr.FootSyllableMora
SentenceClausePhrasePhraseWordMorpheme
StanzaLineFootWordSyllableÂ
"You other brothers can't deny that when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get sprung."
"You other brothers can't deny that when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get sprung."
Baby Got Back (Sir Mix-A-Lot, 1992)
"I like big butts and I can not lie."
Baby Got Back (Sir Mix-A-Lot, 1992)
"I like big butts and I can not lie."
Music Syntax
Top Down Approach: Segments
Â
Â
Phrases
Subphrases
Full stop
Coordination
Subordination
Â
.
,
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
,
.
He's So Fine (The Chiffons, 1963)
B.O.B. (OutKast, 2000)
.
.
Come Together (The Beatles, 1969)
.
.
.
.
(Drag...)
Money Maker(Ludacris, 2006)
(Jump)
(Jump)
(Jump)
.
.
.
,
.
80% of musical segments also close a syntactic segment.
Musical segment
Musical segment
Clauses
Music Syntax
Bottom Up Approach: Boundaries
clause
.,;:
IOI
clause
phrase
+
phrase
head
{(<
body
Transitive / Intransitive
"Hanging Conjunctions"
10 out of 957 (1.04%)
and / but / or / (be)cause / then
38 out of 2,407 (1.58%)
Billboard
Rap
,
.
.
.
.
function
[
X
//
//
+
+
//
Baby Got Back (Sir Mix-A-Lot, 1992)
Computational Music Theory
Datasets:
the Musical Corpus of Flow (M.C. Flow)
McGill's Billboard Corpus
www.rapscience.net
ddmal.music.mcgill.ca/research/billboard
124 Successful Hip-Hop Songs1980-2014
Handel Oratorio
kernscores.org
738 Harmonic Transcriptions132 Melodic Transcriptions1959-1991Â
Susanna, Judas Maccabaeus,Semele, the Messiah1741-1749
Tasso in Music Project
www.tassomusic.org
The Leider Project
github.com/corpusmusic/liederCorpusAnalysis
Computational Music/Syntax Theory:Moving forward
Datasets!
More data with lyrics
Syntactic annotations
(Deal with artistic/casual syntax)
German/Italian/French annotators
Questions! Ideas!
All I Ever Need Is You (Sonny & Cher, 1971)
I
V7/vi
vi
V7/IV
,
(
(
{
.
,
+
.
+
.
Silent Lucidity (Queensryche, 1991)
Be My Baby (The Ronettes, 1963)
.
Lyin' Eyes (The Eagles, 1975)
;
.
.
.
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