Deployments of change and novelty in a corpus of popular music

Abstract

This paper considers aspects of form and texture in 20th-century American popular music using a corpus of textural/lyrical/vocal annotations added to the McGill-Billboard corpus (Burgoyne, 2012). The analysis tracks two categories of events: 1) changes differ from immediately prior events; while 2) novelties have not happened previously within a song. I additionally divide these events into their specific species of change (i.e., whether the change involves the introduction of new instrumentation, new harmonizations, etc.), and correlate these events with their position in each track in terms of both clock time and formal zone. These interconnections allow me to demonstrate the types of events that appear at particular places within a song, and suggest ways that listeners may use musical cues to form expectations about a song's form and length.