In these genres, Machaut retained the basic formes fixes but often utilized creative text setting and cadences.

The first important composer of 'chansons' was Guillaume de Machaut, who composed three-voice works in the 'formes fixes' during the 14th century.

The two surviving secular compositions by Domarto are both rondeaux, formes fixes of the type popular with the Burgundian School.

The most prominent secular forms used by the Burgundians were the four formes fixes (rondeau, ballade, virelai, and bergerette), all generically known as chansons.

These chansons were composed in musical forms corresponding to the poetry they set, which were in the so-called formes fixes of rondeau, ballade, and virelai.

The formes fixes (singular forme fixe, "fixed form") are the three fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries French poetic forms: the ballade, rondeau and virelai.

Most of Dufay's secular songs follow the formes fixes (rondeau, ballade, and virelai), which dominated secular European music of the 14th and 15th centuries.

The formes fixes stopped being used in music around the end of the fifteenth century, although their influence continued, but in poetry they, especially the rondeau, continued to be used.

A carole (or corola, in Provençal) is a festive song or medieval dance, related to the formes fixes of the early Renaissance, and the ancestor of the English carol.

It is one of the three formes fixes (the others were the ballade and the rondeau) and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

Later 15th- and early 16th-century figures in the genre included Johannes Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez, whose works cease to be constrained by formes fixes and begin to feature a similar pervading imitation to that found in contemporary motets and liturgical music.

At mid-century, Claudin de Sermisy and Clément Janequin were composers of so-called Parisian chansons, which also abandoned the formes fixes and were in a simpler, more homophonic style, sometimes featuring music that was meant to be evocative of certain imagery.