Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group

 This is a widely reported study so part of it is posted here...

 

Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music

Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. 

 

Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. 

 

However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. 

 

Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness. 

 

 

Introduction

Isn't it always the same? This question could be easily posed while listening to the music of any mainstream radio station in a western country. Like language, music is a human universal involving perceptually discrete elements displaying organization¹.

Therefore, contemporary popular music may have a well-established set of underlying patterns and regularities^{1, 2, 3, 4}, some of them potentially inherited from the classical tradition^{5, 6, 7}.

Yet, as an incomparable artistic product for conveying emotions⁸, music must incorporate variation over such patterns in order to play upon people's memories and expectations, making it attractive to listeners^{3, 4, 5}.

For the very same reasons, long-term variations of the underlying patterns may also occur across years⁹.

Many of these aspects remain formally unknown or lack scientific evidence, specially the latter, which is very often neglected in music-related studies, from musicological analyses to technological applications.

The study of patterns and long-term variations in popular music could shed new light on relevant issues concerning its organization, structure, and dynamics¹⁰.

More importantly, it addresses valuable questions for the basic understanding of music as one of the main expressions of contemporary culture: 

Can we identify some of the patterns behind music creation? 

Do musicians change them over the years? 

Can we spot differences between new and old music? 

Is there an ‘evolution’ of musical discourse?


Current technologies for music information processing^{11, 12} provide a unique opportunity to answer the above questions under objective, empirical, and quantitative premises.

Moreover, akin to recent advances in other cultural assets¹³, they allow for unprecedented large-scale analyses.

One of the first publicly-available large-scale collections that has been analyzed by standard music processing technologies is the million song dataset¹⁴.

Among others, the dataset includes the year annotations and audio descriptions of 464,411 distinct music recordings (from 1955 to 2010), which roughly corresponds to more than 1,200 days of continuous listening.

Such recordings span a variety of popular genres, including rock, pop, hip hop, metal, or electronic. Explicit descriptions available in the dataset¹⁵ cover three primary and complementary musical facets²: loudness, pitch, and timbre. Loudness basically correlates with our perception of sound amplitude or volume (notice that we refer to the intrinsic loudness of a recording, not the loudness a listener could manipulate).

Pitch roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements.

Timbre accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality, and can be essentially associated with instrument types, recording techniques, and some expressive performance resources.

These three music descriptions can be obtained at the temporal resolution of the beat, which is perhaps the most relevant temporal unit in music, specially in western popular music^{2, 4}.

Here we study the music evolution under the aforementioned premises.....




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Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group
 LINK:
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120726/srep00521/full/srep00521.html