The College Fight Song Corpus

Collaboration with Daniel Shanahan (Northwestern University) and Zachary Lookenbill (University of Arkansas).

A PDF version of the SMPC 2026 poster is available to see here.

A spreadsheet of the metadata for the Voice-Piano Arrangements is available here.

Any comments or questions can be sent to stefanie.acevedo[a]uconn.edu

Abstract

(As presented at SMPC 2026 Conference)

College fight songs are a significant part of US-American identity, “audible signs and symbols” of where college football dominates (Tipton, 2023). Many fight songs were adapted from older songs or written in the early 20th century (Studwell, 1995; Baily, 2012), “[spanning] the stylistic spectrum of US popular music” (Tipton, 2023), but have received little focus in academic scholarship (Studwell, 1995; Hwang, and Ballouli 2019; Hannah, Thompson, and Morton, 2023; Tipton, 2023). Similarly, it is difficult to find song compilations due to lack of resources, copyright, and lack of consistency in sources (i.e. differences in titles; Studwell, 1995). In this study, we use a corpus of fight songs to explore the relationship between musical tendencies in this distinct genre as compared to both artistic and vernacular song.

We have collected a sample set of MIDI transcriptions of college fight songs from around the United States (N = 19 to date). Data was collected from college band directors, band websites, and libraries, focusing on NCAA Division 1 football schools. The dataset includes full marching band arrangements, as well as MIDI voice-piano arrangements, along with metadata such as creation date and composer/lyricist, cross-referenced with previous studies (FiveThirtyEight, 2019; Hannah, Thompson, and Morton, 2023). These transcriptions will help expand the understanding of style enculturation and perception of 20th-century American popular music, and enable research in the understudied field of the marching arts. 

We include summary figures and statistics about the collected songs. Due to the combined influences of marches and popular styles, we expect these songs to yield a homogenous corpus. Preliminary analysis shows stylistic consistency of the studied songs in comparison to two other corpora, the Bach Chorales Corpus and Essen Folk Song Collection (Huron, 1995) as measured by information content (derived from a LTM- vs. STM-trained model, IDyOM; Pearce, 2005, 2018).

Works Cited

Baily, D. (2012). College songs. In Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2228093.  

FiveThirtyEight. (2019). Fight Songs. [Github Data set]. https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/fight-songs

Hanna, C., Thompson, R., & Morton, J. T. (2023). You know the words: A content analysis of college fight songs. Journal of Emerging Sport Studies 9. https://doi.org/10.26522/jess.v9i.4407.

Hwang, Y., & Ballouli, K. (2019). Contemporary issues and opportunities for university branding through fight songs. Journal of Contemporary Athletics 13(2), 85-97.

Huron, D. (1995). The Humdrum Toolkit: Reference manual. Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities.

Pearce, M. T.  (2005). The construction and evaluation of statistical models of  melodic structure in music perception and composition.(Publication No. 301666087) [Doctoral dissertation, City University London]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Pearce, M. T. (2018). Statistical learning and probabilistic prediction in music cognition: mechanisms of stylistic enculturation. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1423, 378-395. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.13654.

Shanahan, D., & Shanahan, E. (2014). The Densmore collection of Native American songs: A new corpus for studies of effects of geography and social function in music. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC 2014), 206–209.

Studwell, W. E. (1995). American college fight songs: History and historiography. Popular Music and Society 19(3), 125-130. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007769508591602.

Studwell, W. E., &  Schueneman, B. R. (2011). College fight songs: An annotated anthology (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Tipton, C. (2023). From Dixie to Rocky Top: Music and meaning in Southeastern Conference football. Vanderbilt University Press. 

Wiering, F., Veltkamp, R. C., Garbers, J., Volk, A., van Kranenburg, P., & Grijp, L. P. (2009). Modelling folksong melodies. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 34(2-3), 154-171.