LyCon: Lyrics Reconstruction from the Bag-of-Words Using Large Language Models

This paper addresses the unique challenge of conducting research in lyric studies, where direct use of lyrics is often restricted due to copyright concerns. Unlike typical data, internet-sourced lyrics are frequently protected under copyright law, necessitating alternative approaches. Our study introduces a novel method for generating copyright-free lyrics from publicly available Bag-of-Words (BoW) datasets, which contain the vocabulary of lyrics but not the lyrics themselves. Utilizing metadata associated with BoW datasets and large language models, we successfully reconstructed lyrics. We have compiled and made available a dataset of reconstructed lyrics, LyCon, aligned with metadata from renowned sources including the Million Song Dataset, Deezer Mood Detection Dataset, and AllMusic Genre Dataset, available for public access. We believe that the integration of metadata such as mood annotations or genres enables a variety of academic experiments on lyrics, such as conditional lyric generation.

A Comparative Analysis of Poetry Reading Audio: Singing, Narrating, or Somewhere In Between?

This paper provides a computational analysis of poetry reading audio signals at a large scale to unveil the musicality within professionally-read poems. Although the acoustic characteristics of other types of spoken language have been extensively studied, most of the literature is limited to narrative speech or singing voice, discussing how different they are from each other. In this work, we develop signal processing methods, which are tailored to capture the unique acoustic characteristics of poetry reading based on their silence patterns, temporal variations of local pitch, and beat stability. Our large-scale statistical analyses on three big corpora, each of which consists of narration (LibriSpeech), singing voice (Intonation), and poetry reading (from The Poetry Foundation), discover that poetry reading does share some musical characteristics with singing voice, although it may also resemble narrative speech.