An article Thursday (7/26) on The Economist’s science and technology blog states, “The kids these days play their music too loud and it all sounds the same. Old fogies familiar with such sentiments will be happy to hear that maths bears them out. An analysis published in Scientific Reports by Joan Serrà of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona and his colleagues has found that music has indeed become both more homogeneous and louder over the decades. … The researchers focussed on the primary musical qualities of pitch, timbre and loudness, which were available for nearly 0.5m songs released from 1955 to 2010. They found that music today relies on the same chords as music from the 1950s. Nearly all melodies are composed of ten most popular chords. … What has changed is how the chords are spliced into melodies. In the 1950s many of the less common chords would chime close to one another in the melodic progression. More recently, they have tended to be separated by the more pedestrian chords, leading to a loss of some of the more unusual transitions. Timbre, lent by instrument types and recording techniques, similarly shows signs of narrowing. … What music lost in variety, it has gained in volume. Songs today are on average 9 decibels louder than half a century ago.”
Posted July 27, 2012
