# The Minor Fall, the Major Lift: Inferring Emotional Valence of Musical Chords through Lyrics

## TL;DR

This study explores how musical chords, especially major chords, are associated with lyrics' emotional content across various genres, regions, and eras, revealing both known and new insights into musical-emotional relationships.

## Contribution

It provides a large-scale analysis linking chords and lyrics, highlighting regional and genre variations, and suggesting diverse emotional associations for different chord types.

## Key findings

- Major chords are generally associated with positive valence.
- Significant variation in chord-emotion associations across regions and genres.
- Potential existence of distinct emotional meanings for other chord types.

## Abstract

We investigate the association between musical chords and lyrics by analyzing a large dataset of user-contributed guitar tablatures. Motivated by the idea that the emotional content of chords is reflected in the words used in corresponding lyrics, we analyze associations between lyrics and chord categories. We also examine the usage patterns of chords and lyrics in different musical genres, historical eras, and geographical regions. Our overall results confirms a previously known association between Major chords and positive valence. We also report a wide variation in this association across regions, genres, and eras. Our results suggest possible existence of different emotional associations for other types of chords.