When listening to speech, we often benefit when also seeing the speaker's face. If this advantage is not domain specific for speech, the recognition of sung lyrics should also benefit from seeing the singer's face. By independently varying the sight and sound of the lyrics, we found a substantial comprehension benefit of seeing a singer. This benefit was robust across participants, lyrics, and ...

Lyrics are rich in features such as rhyme, pleasantness, similes, metaphors and more. Many of these features are exclusive to lyrics. We have estimated that more than two thousand Tamil lyrics are being created every year in various forms. Modeling the lyric-specific features becomes an essential task in organizing the lyrics for retrieval and analysis. In this paper, we propose three scoring m...

Which comes first—the lyrics or the music? Here we consider the lyrics-first approach to songwriting and seek to augment the process by developing a creativity-support tool which uses lyrics as a creative constraint for rhythm generation. We describe a novel algorithm for suggesting possible melodic rhythms to complement the accent structure of a given set of lyrics. The algorithm is composed o...

The cognitive relationship between lyrics and tunes in song is currently under debate, with some researchers arguing that lyrics and tunes are represented as separate components, while others suggest that they are processed in integration. The present study addressed this issue by means of a functional magnetic resonance adaptation paradigm during passive listening to unfamiliar songs. The repe...

Rap music has had a contentious relationship with the legal system, including censorship, regulation, and artists being arrested for lewd and profane performances. More recently, rap lyrics have been introduced by prosecutors to establish guilt in criminal trials. Some fear this form of artistic expression will be inappropriately interpreted as literal and threatening, perhaps because of stereo...