Popular Voices pp 63–⁠78

Abstract

More than 3000 tune names have been collected in order to build the TIMBRE database from a corpus combining French vaudevilles (short plays interspersed with sung parts) and French songs by Béranger and Jouy printed in the 19th century. These tunes have the particularity of being popular tunes reused to set new texts to music, and therefore have a particular name in French: “timbre”. This paper aims to trace the construction of the database and to study the use of these timbres, their composer, original genre and vitality, by alternating close and distant reading methods. One of our major results pertains, for instance, to the identification of the important role played by new tunes composed for vaudeville in the establishment of new timbres in the first part of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the reuse of these new tunes composed for vaudeville seems to decrease considerably at the end of the 19th century, as shown by the study of Jules Jouy's song production.

About

Nugues, L., & Couturier, N. (2025). Constructing a TIMBRE Database: Handling the Reuse of Popular Tunes. In M. Väina, M. K. Lotman, A. S. Bories, P. Ruiz Fabo, P. Plecháč, & S. Mett (Eds.), Popular Voices: Computational Analysis of Poetry and Song (pp. 63–78). Tartu: ELM Scholarly Press. doi: 10.7592/PP2025.04.nugues_couturier

DOI
http://doi.org/10.7592/PP2025.04.nugues_couturier

Print ISBN
978-9916-742-77-8

Online ISBN
978-9916-742-78-5

© Estonian Literary Museum
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© Cover design: Anne-Sophie Bories

Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)