Interactions of timbre, genre, and form in popular music
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Interactions of timbre, genre, and form in popular music
Lindsey Reymore (McGill University) [PI] with Nicole Biamonte (McGill University) Matthew Zeller (McGill University), Leigh Van Handel (University of British Columbia), Ben Duinker (University of Toronto), Jade Roth (McGill University), Jeremy Tatar (McGill University), and external collaborator Christopher White (University of Massachussetts)
April 15th, 2021
Description:
Timbre is an important stylistic and structural parameter in popular music, yet its specific functional roles in this repertoire have not yet been theorized. Most music-analytical scholarship on timbre in popular music to date consists of case studies of individual artists, bands, studios, or genres (e.g., Blake 2012, Fink et al. 2018, Lavengood 2020, Scotto 2017, Womack & Davis 2006). A recent corpus study by White et al. (2021) of a 665-song subset of the McGill-Billboard corpus demonstrates that timbral and textural changes serve as important formal markers but identifies only general trends. There have been no broad corpus studies establishing timbral norms for genres or eras of popular music.
Our study builds foundations for research toward this goal. First, we will build a new popular-music corpus of 400 songs, including 100 songs each from four disparate genres: country, pop, heavy metal, and hip hop. Song selection will balance genre typicality with considerations of gender and racial diversity as well as chronological representation; details related to timbre, texture, and form for each song will be encoded and analyzed by genre to establish normative timbral and textural combinations as well as typical differences among genres. We will also analyze normative timbral and textural characteristics for standard formal song sections, typical contrasts between adjacent sections, and typical trajectories over the course of a song. We intend to use Strategic Funding to hire ACTOR student members to encode this corpus. For later phases of this project, which will include augmenting the number of popular genres and songs in the corpus and systematically investigating chronological changes in timbre and texture, we anticipate seeking SSHRC funding.
