Visual Lyrics: Generating Animated Text for Music Lyric Videos with an Augmented Text Editor

Animated lyric videos transform song lyrics into dynamic visual experiences, offering a powerful medium for artistic expression and audience engagement. However, creating these videos is challenging, requiring expertise in audio, typography, graphic design, and animation, making it inaccessible to novices. To address this challenge, we introduce Visual Lyrics, a proof-of-concept system for generating animated lyric videos controlled with an augmented text editor interface. We examined existing lyric videos to distill a taxonomy and design guidelines, informing the design of Visual Lyrics. Our key insight is a multimodal music analysis pipeline based on the taxonomy and leveraging LLM’s strong natural language understanding and code generation capabilities to synthesize creative and semantically meaningful animations. We collected a dataset of over 300 code-driven creative text animations to serve as inspiration for our LLM-driven pipeline, which we open source. In a user study, Visual Lyrics enabled novices to easily create high-quality animated lyric videos with high ratings of enjoyment, inspiration, and exploration.