The Minor Fall, the Major Lift: Inferring Emotional Valence of Musical Chords through Lyrics
This research addresses the problem of understanding emotional associations in music for musicologists and AI applications, but it is incremental as it builds on prior knowledge.
The study analyzed a large dataset of guitar tablatures to investigate the association between musical chords and lyrics, confirming a known link between Major chords and positive emotional valence and finding variations across regions, genres, and eras.
We investigate the association between musical chords and lyrics by analyzing 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 analyze 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 confirms 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.