Corpus Formation in Popular Music Scholarship

Abstract

Abstract Over the past few years, various datasets have been used to create corpus studies of popular music. Such sets are typically analyzed to reveal characteristics of the music that might not otherwise be possible to observe without the assistance of computer processing. This approach contrasts strikingly with the way scholars have traditionally come to generalizations and observations about musical structure, style, and development in the past. This chapter focuses on corpus formation and argues that meaningful results are most often obtained when the songs included in the dataset or corpus (digital or analog) are determined by context, characteristics, and considerations that best align with the claims being made and not solely by the Billboard charts, frequency of streaming in the recent past, Rolling Stone lists of top songs, or other ready-made lists.