Elicitation of Emotional Response from Music Lyrics

Abstract

The emotional effect of music lyrics on humans has not been widely researched. There were 53 participants that ranged from ages 19-34 in this study. Of the 53 participants, 43 identified as female, 10 identified as male, and music education varied amongst participants. Three methods were used to conduct this study including a sentiment analysis, a perception analysis, and a survey. The sentiment analysis analyzed words in 497 songs from the Billboard year-end music charts for the country, pop, and urban genre formats. The perception analysis used the Dialsmith Perception Analyzer software to measure moment-to-moment participant feedback for nine selected songs from the year-end music charts. The survey was used as a participant self-report for opinions on each of the nine songs. Bivariate correlations were used to find relationships among sentiment scores and moment-to-moment scores, internal and external factors and moment-to-moment scores, and sentiment scores and song performance on the Billboard charts. There were significant relationships for all correlations except year-end chart performance. Sentiments and human response were not an indicators of year-end chart rank performance for the nine songs that the participants listened to.