Effects of Instrumentation and Lyrical Content on the Perceived Genre of Popular Music

The purpose of this study was to understand the effects of both instrumentation and lyrical content on the perceived genre of popular music. Participants for this study (N= 58) were undergraduate and graduate students from a large, public, south-eastern university. Results revealed there was no significate difference between the effect that instrumentation alone had on the perceived genre of music compared to the full composition/recording (instrumentation and lyrics). However, there were significant differences found between the effect that lyrical content alone had on the perceived genre of music compared to the full composition/recording, as well as the effect that instrumentation alone had on the perceived musical genre compared to that of lyrical content alone. This indicated that even though lyrical content does in fact matter in how a song is classified, instrumentation is more impactful in that regard.