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posted by n1 on Sunday May 17 2015, @12:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the nevermind-the-bollocks dept.

As reported in The Economist, scientists at the University of London have analyzed fifty years of pop music, and have used statistical techniques to identify three musical "revolutions" of lasting impact.

These revolutions do all correspond with times musical critics would have said change was happening (classic rock, new wave, and hip-hop respectively), but this analysis suggests other apparent novelties, such as the punk of the 1970s, were not the revolutions that their fans might like to believe.

From the article (well worth reading):

They used Last.fm, a music-streaming service, to collect 30-second clips from 17,094 songs (86% of the total) that were (on the Billboard) chart between 1960 and 2010. Then they attacked each clip with sonic analysis and statistics.

They found that they could extract what they describe as “topics” from the music. These were coherent harmonic and timbral themes which were either present in or absent from a clip. Harmonic topics, of which there were eight, captured classes of chord change, or their absence (eg, “dominant 7th-chord changes” and “major chords without changes”). Timbral topics, of which there were also eight, were things like “drums, aggressive, percussive” and “female voice, melodic, vocal.”

The comment thread below the article is also highly recommended, and the dismissal of punk is certainly egregious.

The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010, published by the Royal Society, is found here.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2015, @07:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2015, @07:08PM (#184144)

    Using different old stuff to make new stuff. Not revolutionary perhaps, but good enough for me. They're one of the few bands where it's hard for me to make a top 10 list of their stuff - can think of more than 10 good songs and it depends on what your taste and mood is :).

    Anyway they're looking at the Billboard Top 100 lists. There've been lots of interesting stuff that don't normally hit those top 100.
    Like hip-hop electro swing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ErUig8i5cM [youtube.com] :)
    Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHih6En5WE4 [youtube.com]
    Or other categories/genres/styles- electronic ( dance, trance), dubstep, k-pop, j-pop, canto-pop, mandarin pop, trip-hop, the whole bunch of different latin stuff, the different jazz genres ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPBmyFsfyPc [youtube.com] ), the different metal genres ( a small subset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpZ18recO9A [youtube.com] go find the rest yourself if you want - like Mongolian folk metal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZJKyRISchU [youtube.com] ), there's a whole bunch of different anime music, "gospel", video game music.

    And which top 100? The Billboard Top 100 won't have this but the French will have stuff like this:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m65jhGwtWrg [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8be8zBJWDJw [youtube.com]
    Yes those are similar to the US Top 100 but how similar?

    So you're probably measuring the change or "revolution" in the tastes of a large population, but it's probably not even the majority of the whole world.

    But if the control of Labels weakens more the Billboard Top 100 might not even be a good reflection of that population (or that population is shrinking - depends on how you want to define it). Stuff like "Gangnam Style" and "What Does The Fox Say" didn't get popular by the "usual channels" and their youtube popularity rankings are different from their Billboard rankings.

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