Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music

Abstract

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.

Themes of Lust and Love in Popular Music Lyrics From 1971 to 2011

“…Not surprisingly, popular music has changed over time within Western society. For example, since the 1960s, popular music has become sadder-sounding (Schellenberg & von Scheve, 2012), as well as louder and less variable in pitch and timbre (Serrà, Corral, Boguñá, Haro, & Arcos, 2012). Content analyses of music lyrics have indicated increases over the past 30 years in self-focused and antisocial words (DeWall, Pond, Campbell, & Twenge, 2011) and in references to alcohol and other recreational substances (Christenson, Roberts, & Bjork, 2012).…”

Food as a Commons: Reframing the Narrative of the Food System

“…That impoverishing transition is well documented in nature (ecosystems, species: Carpenter & Bishop 2009), culture (languages, food diets, songs: Gorenflo et al 2012;Prescott-Allen & Prescott-Allen, 1990;Serra et al 2012) and economy (enterprises, media: Shah, 2009). The globalizing trend is leading a transition towards a less diverse world.…”

The datafied society, studying culture through data

“…They take computational methods and algorithms developed by computer scientists for studying contemporary user-generated content and apply them to historical media artefacts created by professionals. The most prominent examples are 'Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence' (Saleh et al 2014), 'Infectious Texts: modelling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers' (Smith et al 2013), 'Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music' (Serrà et al 2012) and 'Quicker, faster, darker: Changes in Hollywood film over 75 years' (Cutting et al 2011).…”