Songs tell a story: The Arc of narrative for music

Abstract

Research suggests that a core lexical structure characterized by words that define plot staging, plot progression, and cognitive tension underlies written narratives. Here, we investigate the extent to which song lyrics follow this underlying narrative structure. Using a text analytic approach and two publicly available datasets of song lyrics including a larger dataset (N = 12,280) and a smaller dataset of greatest hits (N = 2,823), we find that music lyrics tend to exhibit a core Arc of Narrative structure: setting the stage at the beginning, progressing the plot steadily until the end of the song, and peaking in cognitive tension in the middle. We also observe differences in narrative structure based on musical genre, suggesting different genres set the scene in greater detail (Country, Rap) or progress the plot faster and have a higher rate of internal conflict (Pop). These findings add to the evidence that storytelling exhibits predictable language patterns and that storytelling is evident in music lyrics.

Fig 1. Segmentation strategy and Arc of narrative example.

Fig 2. Segmentation and analysis of lyrics example for yellow by coldplay.

Fig 3. The Arc of narrative plot for yellow by coldplay.

Fig 4. The Arc of narrative for the larger dataset.

Fig 5. The Arc of narrative for the smaller dataset (top hits).