Lyric-Based Rhythm Suggestion
Eric Nichols · University of Michigan Library Repository · 2009
Which comes first-the lyrics or the music?Here we consider the lyrics-first approach to songwriting and seek to augment the process by developing a creativity-support tool which uses lyrics as a creative constraint for rhythm generation.We describe a novel algorithm for suggesting possible melodic rhythms to complement the accent structure of a given set of lyrics.The algorithm is composed of three main components: a scoring function used to judge the relative success of candidate rhythms, a database of English pronunciation to determine syllable stress levels, and traditional search techniques to find highscoring rhythms in a large space of candidate rhythms.Preliminary results are encouraging: given existing song lyrics, the "correct" human-composed rhythm is generally found high in the list of suggestions.