This One Goes To 11.

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent
6:22PM BST 26 Jul 2012

The scepticism about modern music shared by many middle-aged fans has been vindicated by a study of half a century's worth of pop music, which found that today's hits really do all sound the same.

Parents who find their children's thumping stereos too much to bear will also be comforted to know that it isn't just the effect of age: modern songs have also grown progressively louder over the past 50 years.

The study, by Spanish researchers, analysed an archive known as the Million Song Dataset to discover how the course of music changed between 1955 and 2010.

While loudness has steadily increased since the 1950s, the team found that the variety of chords, melodies and types of sound being used by musicians has become ever smaller.

Joan Serra of the Spanish National Research Council, who led the study published in the Scientific Reports journal, said: "We found evidence of a progressive homogenisation of the musical discourse.

"The diversity of transitions between note combinations – roughly speaking chords plus melodies – has consistently diminished in the past 50 years."

The "timbre" of songs – the number of different tones they include, for example from different instruments – has also become narrower, he added.

The study was the first to conduct a large-scale measurement of "intrinsic loudness", or the volume a song is recorded at, which determines how loud it will sound compared with other songs at a particular setting on an amplifier.

It appeared to support long-standing claims that the music industry is engaged in a "loudness war" in which volumes are gradually being increased.

Although older songs may be more varied and rich, the researchers advised that they could be made to sound more "fashionable and groundbreaking" if they were re-recorded and made blander and louder.

They wrote: "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."



Post Edited (02-18-13 17:06)

Wasn't sure if this was another one of your satires, hoip - nope, it's a real article:
Modern Music Really Does Sound The Same

Good to have some scientific backing for what I've long suspected. One of the things I love about Rat-Pack era crooners and old instrumental music is all the cool chords/chord progressions. It's a gold-mine waiting for modern songwriters to tap into. (But of course if they do, then they won't seem "contemporary.") At some point everything boiled down to major chords, A-D-E. Which is great if you're The Ramones, but hey, there's a big wide world out there.

And years of perusing old records have lead me to wonder: what happened to all the other instruments? You used to be able to buy major-label records played on, say, zithers. Or xylophones. I actually have a thrift-store discovery of the hits of Glen Campbell played on marimbas. If anyone were to do something like that nowadays, it would be seen as some weird experiment, or conceptual joke. Back then, it was simply pop music.

Everything that isn't guitars/drums, or boomin' electronics, is "kitsch." So much for hundreds of years of musical history...



Post Edited (02-19-13 12:44)

> One of the things I love about Rat-Pack era crooners and old instrumental music is all the cool
> chords/chord progressions. It's a gold-mine waiting for modern songwriters to tap into. (But of
> course if they do, then they won't seem "contemporary.")

Maybe not, but as we can all attest, discerning fans know & appreciate the difference. So do discerning musicians. Joe Jackson toured last year behind his album The Duke. Most of JJ's band members were young enough to be Joe's children; it's unlikely they grew up loving Ellington's music the way JJ did. At their Seattle gig, the musicians all clearly were having a great time onstage. I think they saw this as a great opportunity to stretch out on music of quality & distinction, the likes of which just doesn't get heard very often anymore.

I guess since they're Spanish researchers, they're used to rich, spicy food; colorful, melodic music; and hot, passionate Latin lovers. Anything removed from that world has to be less compelling.