According to affect valuation theory (Tsai et al., 2006), culture shapes the emotions people ideally want to feel. In middle-class European-American settings, people usually report that they would ideally like to feel high-arousal positive (HAP) emotions (enthusiastic, excited, and elated). In Asian American and East-Asian settings, people are more likely to report ideally wanting to feel low-arousal positive (LAP) emotions (calm, relaxed, and peaceful). We tested whether popular song lyrics in the United States and Japan reflect these values. We collected the lyrics of the 100 most popular songs from each year between 1968 and 2015 from the United States and Japan (N = 7,464). A natural language processing tool called Contextualized Construct Representation (Chen et al., 2024) estimated HAP and LAP content in each song. Lyrics were higher on ideal than actual positive emotions. U.S. American popular songs scored higher on ideal and actual HAP, and Japanese popular songs scored higher on ideal and actual LAP. Longitudinal analyses showed that both HAP and LAP increased slightly over time in Japan, while HAP declined slightly in the United States. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A good number of storytellers depict the villager’s journey or relocation to the urban city as a psycho-intellectual transition from ‘primitivism’ to modernism, or a life-changing experience. Indeed, many Nigerian novelists, popular singers and cineastes among other storytellers rely on the popular dictum, which stipulates that a journey to a new world is always a didactic experience or a great opportunity to learn. These storytellers also bring to their narratives Plato’s allegory of the cave by representing the villager who moves into the megacity as an explorer and self-learner who, through his fateful exodus and embrace of various urban popular cultures, leaves the darkness and ‘primitivism’ of the village to enter the light of modernism. This entrance into the light of urbanity is marked by life-changing discoveries and forms of emancipation. In many Nollywood films, this trope is manifested through storylines that depict the life of a naive villager who leaves his hometown to seek greener pastures in a big Nigerian urban city, notably Lagos, Abuja or Enugu. The depiction of the villager’s urban experience is mainly constructed with the aid of popular myths and images of specific Nigerian megacities. Using a semiotico-philosophical reading of Muyideen Ayinde’s O Om’Eko (2012) and Femi Adebayo’s Jelili (2012), this paper seeks to illustrate the trope mentioned above. The paper is divided into three main parts. In the first place, it provides a theoretical framework on Plato’s allegory of the cave and how it is reflected in some films. In the second place, the paper explores popular Nigerian imaginations about villagers’ experiences with Lagos. In its last part, the paper addresses O Om’Eko’s and Jelili’s representation of the enlightenment and emancipation of the villager in Lagos.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to investigate two uses of Zilipendwa (‘golden oldies’) in newer forms of Tanzanian popular music. The first is Kwanza Unit’s Bongo Boom Bap hip-hop track “Msafiri” (1999) which digitally samples an earlier song of the same name. The second is a late 2010s pop song titled “Zilipendwa” (2017) by the Tanzanian musician Diamond Platnumz featuring the WCB Wasafi artists. Comparing songs from different eras will address the two primary aims of this article: First, to designate distinctions between types of borrowing/intertextuality in musical examples (including audio-visual components in music videos), and to show why such distinctions matter. Second, to compare two different uses of Zilipendwa in two different eras (1990s and 2010s) and genres (Bongo Boom Bap and Tanzanian popular music), and utilized via different means (sampling vs. reperforming) to show the ways in which borrowing from the past contributes to their current meanings. We use sampling and intertextuality as a lens with which to investigate how the ‘conversation’ between new and old musical text(s) lend insight into complex meanings of Tanzanian music and politics.

This study explores the role of popular music in promoting epistemic justice and inclusive poetry pedagogy in South African Grade 10 English classrooms. Traditional poetry instruction often marginalises learners' cultural knowledge by privileging canonical texts, limiting access to literary meaning-making and reinforcing hierarchical knowledge structures. Drawing on a decolonial and social justice framework, this action research study engaged learners in iterative cycles where carefully selected popular songs were paired with poems to create meaningful connections between learners' cultural worlds and literary texts. The study involved five action research cycles in which poems were paired with culturally familiar songs in order to scaffold learners' understanding of poetic devices, themes, and tone. Data were generated through multiple methods, including open-ended questionnaires and classroom activities, and were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings indicate that integrating popular music legitimised learners' cultural experiences, disrupted exclusionary pedagogical practices, and fostered equitable access to literary interpretation. Learners demonstrated enhanced cognitive engagement, critical reflection, and appreciation of poetic forms, language, and themes. Learner responses further indicated that music functioned as a cognitive and affective scaffold, enabling them to connect abstract literary concepts with familiar cultural texts. The study further highlights the transformative potential of culturally responsive teaching practices that foreground learners' epistemic contributions, challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge, and enable inclusive literacy learning. By centring learners' voices and lived experiences, this research provides evidence that popular music can function both as a pedagogical tool and as a vehicle for epistemic justice, supporting social change and contributing to efforts to decolonise literature education in South African schools.

At a historical moment of polycrisis, it has never been more urgent to re- engage with the multiple semantic possibilities of survival. This article explores varying accounts of survival that emerge in the interplay between community media and popular music traditions in Ajusco, a small town south of Mexico City in which Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but in which an “originary” identity has been preserved. Interlacing the ethnographic and the historical, the article shows how activities to maintain popular and folk musical traditions, especially mariachi, respond to questions of community identity, safety, livelihoods, and ecosystem survival. Here, music may be drawn into a virtuous cycle, as distinct ecological, economic and cultural iterations of survival come into relation, often complementing and supporting each other. Building on this research, the article proposes the concept of “transmedialities of survival” to describe the complex interactions across distinct media technologies through which concepts of survival are disseminated.

This case study investigated how 30 students in a post-secondary popular music diploma program in Singapore co-created and applied ensemble agreements —peer-devised frameworks for guiding rehearsal behavior and communication. Drawing on student-generated documents, reflective questionnaires, and focus group interviews over 1 academic year, the study examined how these agreements influenced collaboration, leadership, accountability, and perceptions of teacher presence. Students initially adopted rule-based, punitive models, but gradually shifted toward dialogic, collaborative approaches emphasizing shared responsibility and mutual respect. Challenges included uneven adherence, blurred responsibility, and negotiating authority between teachers and peers. By year’s end, students viewed ensemble agreements as adaptable frameworks that helped to navigate and maintain professionalism, trust, and collective agency in rehearsal contexts. The findings indicate that ensemble agreements can enhance collaboration and reflective practice in small ensemble settings across varied genres and skill levels.

Is There a Difference Between the Immediate Effect of Vocal Warm-Up and Continuous Singing on Aerodynamic, Acoustic, and Self-Assessment Vocal Measures?

Abstract This study investigates invisible student trauma. It describes Sofia's case, a female adolescent who has suffered micro and macro oppression since birth. Theoretically grounded in the notion of pervasive invisible trauma, and looking at introspective, reflective, autobiographical, and artistic data gathered over 17 years, the research question is: How did Sofia experience, manifest and navigate invisible pervasive trauma in life and in the classroom? The study combines qualitative and post‐qualitative methodologies to overcome the limitations of language in the expression of trauma. Data types comprise report cards, interviews, psychologists' reports, personal responses to popular songs, social media posts, autobiographical texts, multilingual reflection notes, poems in English and Spanish, and illustrations. Findings indicate that trauma was a lifelong process characterized by enduring pain and despair in the personal, social, and academic domains. Rich and loving responses in the home, the extended family, the school, and the community were necessary to help Sofia navigate trauma and shift toward a healing orientation. Particularly generative were those responses that emerged as spaces of hope and geographical places of love in three classrooms, of which one was an English language classroom. Implications for the creation, fostering, and sustainment of trauma‐informed language pedagogies are considered.

This article explores how Malawi's youth express disillusionment through popular music after unfulfilled promises from the 2020 election campaign. When the government failed to deliver on its commitments, young people experienced disappointment, frustration, hopelessness, and despair—emotions that have found voice in a wave of songs tinged with disillusionment. For these young Malawians, popular music serves as a powerful medium for analyzing and critiquing the contemporary issues shaping their society. Drawing on the concept of social realism, this article examines how popular music captures youth disillusionment with broken political promises. The analysis argues that an aging political class, disconnected from future-oriented solutions, intensifies young people's sense of betrayal. Through the lens of Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed," the article interprets these musical expressions as part of youth struggles for social justice.

Abstract Background One of the core characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is emotional imbalance. Patients often experience intense and uncontrollable feelings of sadness. Listening to music is a common emotion regulation strategy in daily life, but its effectiveness in regulating specific negative emotions of BPD patients in structured situations remains to be further explored. Previous studies have mostly focused on classical or soothing music, while neglecting the potential role of commercial pop music, an easily accessible form. The research explored whether popular songs could effectively alleviate the sadness induced by BPD patients in an experimental environment. Methods The study recruited 80 participants (40 with BPD and 40 matched healthy controls). All participants first watched a five-minute sad film for induction. Following induction, participants were randomly assigned to one of two 10-minute intervention conditions: (1) Music group: Listening to a pre-selected, neutral-to-positive pop song via headphones. (2) Silence group: Sitting quietly in a silent room without auditory stimulation. The primary outcome measure was change in subjective sadness, assessed using a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (no sadness) to 100 (extreme sadness). VAS scores were collected at three time points: baseline (T1), post-sadness induction (T2), and post-intervention (T3). Statistical analysis employed a mixed-effects ANOVA with group and condition as between-subjects factors and time (T1, T2, T3) as within-subjects factors. Results The experiment demonstrated successful induction of sadness, with a significant main effect of time: sadness scores increased significantly for all participants from T1 to T2. BPD participants in the music group exhibited a mean reduction in sadness of 28.5 points, significantly greater than that observed in the silent control group (mean reduction of 12.1 points). The healthy control group in the music condition exhibited an average decrease of 25.3 points, also exceeding the healthy control group in the silent condition (average decrease of 20.8 points), though the effect size was considerably smaller than that observed in the BPD group. At T3, sadness levels in the BPD music group no longer differed significantly from baseline (T1) (p=.124), whereas sadness levels in the BPD silent group remained significantly higher than baseline (p<.01). Key findings are summarized in Table 1. Discussion The research results show that a brief intervention of listening to self-selected popular songs can effectively alleviate the sadness induced by the experiment, and the effect is particularly significant for BPD patients. Pop music may become an effective immediate emotional regulation tool through mechanisms such as distraction, cognitive reevaluation or positive emotional contagion. Future research should explore the long-term effects of personalized music intervention, identify the specific musical features that produce such effects, and use neuroimaging techniques to investigate its neural association mechanisms.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian popular music has been actively responding to the reality of war and exploring the topic of trauma. Many Ukrainian popular music artists have faced the same traumatic experiences as their audiences, which led to a close relationship between such artists and their audiences, as artists’ messages are perceived as sincere and valid. This article examines the lyrics and music videos of Ukrainian popular songs that were created after Russia’s full-scale invasion and deal with such topics as witnessing war, loss, separation, displacement, and mental health issues (including as a result of combat experiences). Guided by academic literature on trauma and cultural narratology, it examines popular songs that have a significant number of views (200,000 or more) on YouTube. The article argues that Ukrainian popular music reflects the trajectory of the full-scale invasion through constructing narratives of trauma at different stages of the post-2022 reality of war (from initial to delayed responses), whilst also creating an imagined community of people who take part in shared meaning-making. Having considered the developments in Ukrainian war-time popular music over the first three years of the invasion, this article shows that popular music becomes an important and easily accessible site of memory. The article highlights the importance of discussing language’s ability to convey trauma and artists’ meaning-making approaches when utilizing lyrics and visuals to narrate trauma in their music.

We examine whether aggregate “music mood” derived from globally popular songs can help forecast primary equity issuance. We build a Friday-anchored weekly panel that merges SEC EDGAR counts of priced Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) with features from the Spotify Daily Top 200 (audio descriptors such as valence, energy, danceability, tempo, loudness, etc.) and Genius-scraped lyrics. We extract lyric sentiment by tokenizing Genius-scraped lyrics and aggregating lexicon-based affect scores (valence and arousal) into popularity-weighted weekly indices. To address sparsity and regime shifts in issuance, we train a leakage-safe Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network on a smoothed target—the forward 4-week sum of IPOs—and obtain next-week forecasts by dividing the predicted sum by 4. On a chronological holdout, a single LSTM with look-back K = 8 outperforms strong baselines—reducing MAE by 13.9%, RMSE by 15.9%, and mean Poisson deviance by 27.6% relative to the best baseline in each metric. Furthermore, we adopt SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to explain our LSTM model, showing that IPO persistence remains the dominant driver, but music and lyrics covariates contribute incremental and robust signal. These results suggest that aggregate music sentiment contains economically meaningful information about near-term IPO activity.

Abstract This paper builds on research conducted in 2008 by Wright into the uneasy power dynamics between a music teacher and her pupils in a secondary school music classroom in Wales as a result of her Western Classical ‘habitus’; by this, we mean the habitual behaviours, attitudes and values that are commonplace when operating as a classical musician. Some 18 years on, and in a transformative Welsh education climate, narrative data collected from pre-service teachers practising in similar classrooms in Wales suggest that they have begun to move away from their Western European classical ‘habitus’ and believe in shared pedagogic ownership that takes account of pupil voice and choice. Furthermore, in learning to teach, they develop pedagogic behaviours more akin to popular musicians, such as being more improvisatory and more willing to tolerate uncertainty. A key factor is the trusting and collaborative relationships they developed with their mentors (teacher-tutors) within an education system in Wales that has committed itself to the concept of subsidiarity. These findings mark a positive step forward for the music education community within a new and aspirational educational landscape in Wales.

The widespread phenomenon of sound horeg in Toyomarto Village, Singosari District, has influenced the popularity of traditional musical instrument learning in elementary schools. The dominance of modern sound systems in community activities and celebrations has shifted students’ musical preferences toward popular music, leading to a decline in interest in traditional instruments such as the angklung and flute. This study aims to describe the role of sound horeg in shaping students’ interest in traditional musical instrument learning, identify the factors contributing to the decline in its popularity, and explore teachers’ efforts to maintain the existence of traditional musical instruments. This study employed a qualitative approach using a case study method. Data were collected through observation, interviews, and documentation involving the school principal, teachers, students, and parents. Data analysis was conducted through data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. The findings show that students’ interest in traditional musical instruments is relatively low due to the dominance of popular culture, limited learning media and instructional methods, and insufficient teacher professionalism. Students tend to prefer popular songs accompanied by sound horeg because they are practical, easily accessible, and entertaining. To address these challenges, teachers implemented experience-based learning, applied innovative teaching methods and media, and strengthened extracurricular activities as spaces for student appreciation of traditional music. This study emphasizes that the success of traditional musical instrument learning depends on synergy among teachers, school support, and the involvement of parents and the local community. The findings are expected to contribute to culturally responsive learning strategies and support the preservation of traditional musical instruments amid the influence of popular culture.

Abstract This essay reconsiders the relationship between the composition of modern Latin verse and the development of English Romantic poetics, by uncovering the influence of the practice of Latinization—the translation of English poetry into Latin—upon a lineage of eighteenth-century writers from Vincent Bourne to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Revising the opposition between the ‘dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages that want the living voice’ and ‘real language’, it argues that Bourne cultivated a distinctively modest and modern Latin style, in part by Latinizing popular English songs; this style then influenced Christopher Smart, Samuel Johnson, William Cowper and Wordsworth. Reading neglected Latin versions of works from Pope’s ‘Ode for Music’ to Cowper’s ‘The Cast-Away’, it shows that (self-)Latinization was a generative, expressive practice for some ‘early Romantic’ poets, and that its influence is often legible in their best-known vernacular works. In these cases, Latinity fostered rather than stymied the development of the poetic values typically associated with Romanticism, such as familiarity, simplicity and self-expression. The overlooked trend of Bournean Latinization can even be read as anticipating some of the flaws in the logic of Wordsworth’s 1802 preface, rather than exemplary of the sins it describes. Ultimately, the poetics of Lyrical Ballads are shown to be not quite as anti-Latinate as its authors assumed.

Popular song does not illustrate History with a capital H, played out elsewhere in muddy trenches, grimy factories or oak-panelled offices. On the contrary, it involves a series of mass activities which are as much a part of history as are working and fighting. This contribution aims at assessing the popular love song repertoires in Britain and in France during the First World War, defining popular song, for our present purposes, simply as the songs which sold the most. In particular I want to analyze the cultural, legal, economic, historical, logistical and social reasons that these two repertoires were so radically different. Indeed, the determinedly upbeat, jolly and prudish repertoire of British music hall evenings contrasted sharply with the romantic, melodramatic, realistic and intimate stories put to music in French café-concerts.

This article analyses the music of two Australian Vietnam War popular songs: ‘Smiley’, written by Johnny Young in 1969, which charted in Australia at number 2 in 1970; and ‘I Was Only 19’ by John Schumann, which charted in Australia at number 1 in 1983. Music has a potential for meaning within the function of the context within which the music is received. The lyrics provide the context by outlining the war focus of each song. The music underpins and adds to the song’s story through specific music devices bringing further meaning to the role of war in the songs. Choice of instruments and their timbre bring associations and vocal register, timbre, and a chorus of voices reinforce the sense of fraternity and aloneness in war. Through these musical devices, the war story is deepened, portraying sympathy, an understanding of the effects of war, and the history and sounds of war and Australian society at the time, with music playing a role within and beyond the lyric context.

Abstract This study explores the lexical and topic evolution of Chinese popular music lyrics from 2000 to 2025, reflecting changing public sentiments and broader socio-cultural transitions. While prior research has largely overlooked non-Western lyric corpora, this study addresses that gap by constructing the Chinese Popular Music Diachronic Corpus, comprising 1,560 representative popular songs sampled across twenty-five years. Using digital humanities approaches, it integrates word frequency analysis, readability metrics, and BERTopic-based topic modelling to trace lexical and topic evolution of lyrics over time. Findings reveal that high-frequency words consistently revolve around emotional expression, individual introspection, and interpersonal dynamics. Type-token ratio (TTR) has increased significantly, indicating growing lexical diversity, while textual complexity shows fluctuation, reflecting stylistic shifts in song writing. Topic analysis identifies twelve major topics, including romantic love, future aspirations, and urban life, with topic structures evolving from natural and temporal abstraction to emotional concreteness and psychological introspection. Recent years show a significant rise in negative emotional topics and self-referential artistic motifs. This study contributes a novel methodological framework for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of music, language, and society, and underscores the value of digital humanities tools in mapping collective emotions and cultural change through large-scale lyric analysis.

This research addresses how an interactive digital tool might emotionally connect the youth with their culture, concentrating on one of the oldest and richest traditions of China - ancient music. The application enables the user to be the instrumentalist of the virtual world through playing the guqin, bianzhong and some popular songs as well, all this while getting step-by-step instructions, a scoring feature, a playback feature, and cultural insights presented in the form of trivia tied to high scores. The purpose of the app is to use the emotional and cultural aspects to bring the past into the young people's present time and thus get them more involved. It was the systematic measures of cultural and musical engagement together with emotional reactions to learning and music that I used for the research whose participants were thirty-six young adults aged 18 to 25 and who completed a 14-day study, where the influence of the traditional cultural activities was compared with this interactive gamified method. The data imply that the app users practice the culture more deeply than other users, so interactive digital instruments can become a powerful tool to revive cultural heritage and, at the same time, make it more fun and educational. The research outcome can shape not only the future of cultural preservation but also that of education.

This paper explores the convergence of Vedic and Western philosophical perspectives, utilizing the popular Gujarati folk song "Goti Lo" and John Lennon's "Imagine" as illustrative examples. Through a meticulous examination of the lyrical content, thematic elements, and underlying philosophical principles of these songs, the study seeks to reveal profound insights that go beyond cultural boundaries. "Goti Lo," deeply rooted in the Vedic tradition, and "Imagine," born out of Western modern thought, both capture fundamental human concerns such as unity, peace, and the search for meaning. This investigation highlights how these songs, regardless of their diverse cultural origins, express a common vision of a peaceful and enlightened world. Through a comparative analysis, this study showcases how the philosophical ideas expressed in these songs have a universal appeal, emphasizing the enduring and transcendent nature of human wisdom. In this paper, the focus is on the impact of music as a means of philosophical expression and its ability to bring people together across different cultures, promoting a shared desire for worldwide peace and harmony.