Allan Olson was no fan of rock music. Decades ago, when he dropped by the familys place on visits, he often asked his long-haired nephew to spare his eardrums from sonic assaults. Youre not going to play any of that Pink Zeppelin, are you? he once asked with a straight face.
My uncle would have loved this: a Spanish study from a few weeks back determining that western popular music has become more simple over the past 50 years, with less dynamic range. Dumber and louder, in other words. I can hear Al laughing in heaven: I told you so! Led Floyd was awful, too!
A team led by Joan Serrà, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, used a dataset that includes the year annotations and audio descriptions of 464,411 distinct music recordings (from 1955 to 2010), which roughly corresponds to more than 1,200 days of continuous listening, according to the teams paper in Nature. They analyzed a range of genresrock, pop, hip hop, metal and electronicmeasuring pitch, timbre, and loudness.
The Spanish study has met with some high-level skepticism. John Matson, associate editor at Scientific American, argues that the songs in the database are heavily weighted from 2005 on, reflecting the digitization of current music. Not only that, he believes more complex songs from the past had a better chance of surviving the competition, with the blander tunes of decades past fading into analog obscurity.
Oh my God, youre right, Serràresponded in a letter to Scientific American. Why didnt we think of this? My career is ruined!! Actually, she acknowledged this might have a small effect, but not enough to significantly skew her teams results.
I dont have a knack for the brain-busting analysis of historical artifacts, so I could no more argue the merits of this research than I could prove or disprove the Shroud of Turin was Christs beach towel. That doesnt mean I cant cherry-pick data to fit my own confirmation bias. For example, most wartime songs strike me as fairly insipid, both lyrically and melodically. But I also think Swinging on a Star from 1944 is a baroque masterpiece compared to Groove Armadas I See You Baby (Shakin That Ass) from 1999.
Im now as old as my uncle when he begged me to keep the needle from the vinyl. And at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon-on-training-wheels, I find most electronic dance music is as mind-numbingly awful as he found Pink Zeppelin.
The Spanish study follows on the heels of a paper from 2011 that analyzed the most popular songs in the U.S. from 19802007. The researchers found that use of words related to self-focus and antisocial behaviour increased, whereas words related to other-focus, social interactions, and positive emotion decreased. So music hasnt just gotten dumber and louder over the past half-century, it has become angrier and more self-absorbed. At least according to the experts.
In an interview on CBC Radio, Maura Johnston, music editor of The Village Voice, insisted that its not all about a descent from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to Ghostface Killah. Its the culture that music is embedded in that has become louder and dumber, she helpfully observed. However, the argument about musical complexity as a measure of musical substance is a bit tricky, especially if we take a wider time frame than the Spanish study. Brahms, Schubert, Sibelius, Mahler and Smetana drew on traditional folksongs and dances of their time in their symphonic creations, and some of the classical masters most affecting workBeethovens Moonlight Sonata, Bachs Air on the G String, or Pachebels Canonare among their simplest constructions, at least to my ears.
The scientific breakdown of pop musics constituent parts and their change over time is very intriguing. Yet it has nothing to say about how music affects us emotionally, which is the reason for its existence in the first place. Researchers could run guitarist David Gilmour through a mass spectrograph to determine his proportions of chemical elements, and still have zero clue about his genius.
Theres still a big difference between the map (musical notation or frequency display) and the territory (the inner world where the artists creativity meets with the listeners comprehension).
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