The emotional content of jingju (aka Beijing or Peking opera) arias is conveyed through pre-defined metrical patterns known as banshi, each of them associated with a specific expressive function. In this paper, we first report the work on a comprehensive corpus of jingju lyrics that we built, suitable for text mining and text analysis in a data-driven framework. Utilizing this corpus, we propos...

Lyrics-to-audio alignment aims to automatically match given lyrics and musical audio. In this work we extend a state of the art approach for lyrics-to-audio alignment with information about note onsets. In particular, we consider the fact that transition to next lyrics syllable usually implies transition to a new musical note. To this end we formulate rules that guide the transition between con...

We investigated the production of sung and spoken utterances in a non-fluent patient, C.C., who had a severe expressive aphasia following a right-hemisphere stroke, but whose language comprehension and memory were relatively preserved. In experiment 1, C.C. repeated familiar song excerpts under four different conditions: spoken lyrics, sung lyrics on original melody, lyrics sung on new but fami...

We study the impact of the presence of lyrics on music mood perception for both Canadian and Chinese listeners by conducting a user study of Canadians not of Chinese origin, Chinese-Canadians, and Chinese people who have lived in Canada for fewer than three years. While our original hypotheses were largely connected to cultural components of mood perception, we also analyzed how stable mood ass...

We present Song Prompter, a software system that acts as a performance guide by showing horizontally scrolling lyrics, chords, beats marks and bar marks in a graphical user interface, together with an audio accompaniment consisting of bass and MIDI drums. A song outline displays the song structure, including names and positions of sections for easy overview and navigation. Song Prompter enables...

Findings on song perception and song production have increasingly suggested that common but partially distinct neural networks exist for processing lyrics and melody. However, the neural substrates of song recognition remain to be investigated. The purpose of this study was to examine the neural substrates involved in the accessing "song lexicon" as corresponding to a representational system th...

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 resul...

The lyrics to the 1965 song My Generation expresses the sentiment that being ‘old’ is undesirable – hence the song line, “Hope I die before I get old”. In a preceding line the lyrics “People try to put us down...” indicate that older people lack pertinent insights into the hopes and desires of young people. The ‘misunderstood’ generation of the 1960s is now today’s ‘baby boomer’ generation – pe...

Some poems are on solemn subjects such as Soul, Life, Fortune, some are on human relations such as Motherhood, To be the Father of a Daughter, Wife of a scholar, A Cock pecked lady, Wife of your Mum, some deal with momentous matters such as no violence please, Nuclear war, NegotiationsThe best tool, some are concerned with Man’s relation with God such as Rich by His grace, To submit to him only...