The Era-Dissociation Effect of Lyrics on Music Aesthetics: Evidence from Chinese Popular Music

The influence of lyrics on music aesthetics has long been a prominent research topic in the fields of aesthetics, musicology, and psychology.However, empirical studies have yielded inconsistent findings concerning the effects of lyrics.Accordingly, the present study examines the effect of lyrics on music aesthetics across historical periods.We selected representative popular music from the late 20th century, known as "era music", and representative popular music from the contemporary period, known as "modern music", both with and without lyrics, as materials.After listening to each music clip, participants sequentially completed aesthetic rating, preference rating, and familiarity rating tasks.We found that the aesthetic rating and its inter-subject correlation for era music with lyrics were significantly higher than those for the version without lyrics, while no significant difference was observed between the two versions of modern music.These results illustrate the era-dissociation effect of lyrics in music aesthetic ratings, suggesting the era-dissociation characteristics of lyrics and the difference in individual subjective aesthetic standards.