Although the song is often the subject of monographs, one of its forms remains insufficiently researched: the vocalised song, communicated to the spectator through performance. The study of the song takes one back to the study of vocal practices, from aesthetic objects to forms and to plural styles. To conceive a song means approaching it in its different instances of creation as well as its linguistic diversity. Jean Nicolas De Surmont proposes ways of research and analysis useful to musicians, musicologists, and literary critics alike. In his book he takes up the issue of vocal poetry in addition to examining the theoretic aspects of song objects. Rather than offering an autonomous model of analysis, De Surmont extends the research fields and suggests responses to debates that have involved everyone interested in vocal poetic forms.

The terminology of genres of song has aroused the interest of musicologists, medievalists, and ethnomusicologists who hope with it to achieve a better understanding of their fields. The analysis presented here of the French vocabulary connected with a ~chansona (TM) starts from a literary genre referred to by the word chanson. A corpus of 400 dictionaries and 900 studies and essays is used to examine the word chanson and its associated word family from their beginnings in Old French up to the modern French language.