Lyrics of a song: An acoustical and neuro-cognitive exploration on Indian music from nonlinear perspective

• Main Authors: Banerjee, Archi, Sanyal, Shankha, Roy, Souparno, Patnaik, Priyadarshi
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• ISSN: 1939-800X
• DOI: 10.1121/2.0001774

A perfect marriage between the lyrics and the melody gives birth to a “song.” A proper song should express the true meaning of its lyrics through the movements of its melodic structure. But, which impacts more: melody or lyrics? The answer is still unknown due to lack of substantial scientific research. This paper aims to explore the acoustical contribution and the neuro-cognitive impact of lyrics in songs from two different genres of Indian music. Six songs from two genres, of either slow or fast tempo, depicting contrast emotions (joy-sorrow), were recorded from a trained musician who consecutively sung (with proper meaningful lyrics) and hummed (without using any lyric or meaningful words) each song. Later EEG signals were recorded from five naive participants while listening to different sets of song-humming (i.e., with lyric-without lyric) pairs of the same melodic content, to study their corresponding neuro-cognitive (EEG) attributes. Nonlinear DFA technique was employed to calculate and compare the Scaling Exponent values for all the recorded audio signals and their corresponding brain (EEG) responses. This pilot study in the context of Indian music revealed that musical tempo plays a key role in determining the acoustical and neuro-cognitive impact of lyrics within a song.