Large-scale multimodal analysis of Pop music culture

Develop truly multimodal computational approaches that provide quantitative empirical results about Pop music culture at scale by integrating audio, visual, textual, and other relevant modalities rather than studying modalities in isolation.

Background

The paper argues that Pop music culture is a multimodal socio-cultural phenomenon involving audio, images, videos, lyrics, metadata, reviews, and other cultural texts. Despite substantial work on distant listening, reading, and viewing, the survey finds that genuinely multimodal studies producing large-scale musicological results remain scarce. In particular, image and video information, along with textual sources beyond lyrics, have received comparatively little computational attention.

The unresolved issue is therefore to develop integrated computational methods capable of analyzing multiple modalities jointly at the scale required for studying Pop music culture, thereby supporting more comprehensive cultural interpretation than modality-specific analyses allow.