A comparative analysis of melodic rhythm in two corpora of American popular music

White, Christopher W.; Pater, Joe; Breen, Mara

doi:10.1080/17459737.2022.2075946

Journal of Mathematics and Music

2022

DOI: 10.1080/17459737.2022.2075946

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A comparative analysis of melodic rhythm in two corpora of American popular music

Christopher W. White

Joe Pater

Mara Breen

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2022

2024

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Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Temperley (2018) also notes a decrease in the average tempo of rock songs from the 1950s-1990s. Finally, White, Pater, and Breen (2022) compares the tactus of premillennial and postmillennial (2015-2019) American popular music with two methods. The first method measures the tactus only within a set range of 70-140 BPM, which identifies a modest tempo decrease between the two corpora, from 103.91 BPM to 99.91 BPM.…”

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Analyzing the Beat in Metrically Consonant Popular Songs

Geary

2022

MTO

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The beat is regularly defined as a song’s primary pulse layer and as a requirement for metric formation. Despite the beat’s familiarity, however, its precise characterization and analytical application is inconsistent in scholarship. In this article, I present a new approach to analyze the beat in popular songs with a consonant, clear, and unchanging quadruple simple meter. At bottom, I take the traditional view of the beat as a singular entity and reframe it a multifaceted phenomenon where different aspects of music can simultaneously, and at times variably, create a sense of metric primacy. My analytical system has three parts: the drum pattern layer, the absolute time layer, and the preferred pulse layer. Further, I introduce the term “interpretive flexibility,” a spin on interpretive multiplicity, to refer to metrically consonant popular songs with multiple options for the perceived beat. In the second half of the article, I apply the three-part system and interpretive flexibility to analyze the beat in popular songs with multiple drum feels and layered drum feels. The evolving sense of metric primacy in these songs is experientially engaging, helps express musical form, and parallels extramusical narratives.

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Analyzing the Beat in Metrically Consonant Popular Songs

Geary

2022

MTO

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Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023

Hamilton,

Pearce

2024

Sci Rep

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In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify "melodic revolutions", changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. Two major revolutions in 1975 and 2000 and one smaller revolution in 1996, characterized by significant decreases in complexity, were located. The revolutions divided the time series into three eras, which were modeled separately with autoregression, linear regression and vector autoregression. Linear regression of autoregression residuals underscored inter-feature relationships, which become stronger in post-2000 melodies. The overriding pattern emerging from these analyses shows decreasing complexity and increasing note density in popular melodies over time, especially since 2000.

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Rhythm, mathematics, and Godfried Toussaint

Yust

White

VanHandel

2022

Journal of Mathematics and Music

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A comparative analysis of melodic rhythm in two corpora of American popular music

Cited by 4 publications

References 40 publications

Analyzing the Beat in Metrically Consonant Popular Songs

Analyzing the Beat in Metrically Consonant Popular Songs

Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023

Rhythm, mathematics, and Godfried Toussaint

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