This paper considers aspects of form and texture in 20th-century American
popular music using a corpus of textural/lyrical/vocal annotations added to
the McGill-Billboard corpus (Burgoyne, 2012). The analysis tracks two
categories of events: 1) *changes* differ from immediately prior events;
while 2) *novelties* have not happened previously within a song. I
additionally divide these events into their specific species of change
(i.e., whether the change involves the introduction of new instrumentation,
new harmonizations, etc.), and correlate these events with their position
in each track in terms of both clock time and formal zone. These
interconnections allow me to demonstrate the types of events that appear at
particular places within a song, and suggest ways that listeners may use
musical cues to form expectations about a song’s form and length.