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Dominikus Baur, Bartholomäus Steinmayr, Andreas Butz
Songwords: Exploring Music Collections Through Lyrics
In Proceedings of the 11th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2010), Utrecht, Netherlands, Aug. 2010 (bib)

The lyrics of a song are an interesting, yet underused type of symbolic music data. We present SongWords, an application for tabletop computers that allows browsing and exploring a music collection based on its lyrics. Song- Words can present the collection in a self-organizing map or sorted along different dimensions. Songs can be ordered by lyrics, user-generated tags or alphabetically by name, which allows exploring simple correlations, e.g., between genres (such as gospel) and words (such as lord). In this paper, we discuss the design rationale and implementation of SongWords as well as a user study with personal music collections. We found that lyrics indeed enable a different access to music collections and identified some challenges for future lyrics-based interfaces.