Algorithms that can understand and interpret characteristics of music, and organise them for and recommend them to their users can be of great assistance in handling the ever growing size of both private and commercial collections. Music is an inherently multi-modal type of data, and the lyrics associated with the music are as essential to the reception and the message of a song as is the audio...

Listening to music moves our minds and moods, stirring interest in its neural underpinnings. A multitude of compositional features drives the appeal of natural music. How such original music, where a composer's opus is not manipulated for experimental purposes, engages a listener's brain has not been studied until recently. Here, we report an in-depth analysis of two electrocorticographic (ECoG...

Previous studies showed that love has become an eternal theme in pop music. But since the early 2000s, new themes with negative sentiments such as pain, despair, fear, and sadness have emerged Along this phenomenon, recent music offers poetic lyrics instead of cliché lyrics. What makes them more interesting is, some are autobiographical. This study aims to analyze originality autobiographical t...

Comprehending lyrics, as found in songs and poems, can pose a challenge to human and machine readers alike. This motivates the need for systems that can understand the ambiguity and jargon found in such creative texts, and provide commentary to aid readers in reaching the correct interpretation. We introduce the task of automated lyric annotation (ALA). Like text simplification, a goal of ALA i...

The times they are a changin’—this wisdom was galvanized into song lyrics by Bob Dylan in 1963 when computers were still in infancy. It took more than two decades until the humble beginnings of the web in 1989. Since then (and well in accordance with Bob Dylan’s lyrics), content and use of the World Wide Web have increased and changed dramatically with now more than 550 billion documents on the...

The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating dire...