Today's "Today" programme at 07:20
featured an interview with
Matthias Mauch, of Queen Mary University of London,
who argued that pop music has experienced three revolutions in 50 years.
The original paper describes the authors' work as "a quantitative picture of the evolution of popular music in the USA over the course of 50 years". Mauch's team examined more than 17 000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100 and found three music revolutions - in 1964, 1983 and 1991.
The characteristics they measured included harmony, chord changes and timbre, and how these characteristics changed over time.
In the early 1960s, they found, dominant seventh chords, typical of jazz and blues started to die out as the new British bands - from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones - came in with a new rocky sound.
The second revolution, in 1983, was driven by new technology including synthesisers, samplers and drum machines.
Then in 1991, the third revolution came along with rap and hip-hop. "This revolution is the biggest", explained Dr Mauch. "It is so prominent in our analysis, because we looked at harmony - and rap and hip-hop don't use a lot of harmony. The emphasis is on speech sounds and rhythm. This was a real revolution: suddenly it was possible that you had a pop song without harmony."
See here for the original paper, and here for the pdf. Mauch's team gathered 30-second-long segments from 17 094 songs and measured a range of quantitative audio features, including 12 relating to tone and 14 relating to timbre.
These 26 features were then combined by experts into 'words', and then into 16 ‘topics’ using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and beyond that into 13 'styles', using k-means clustering on principal components of topic frequencies.
The original paper describes the authors' work as "a quantitative picture of the evolution of popular music in the USA over the course of 50 years". Mauch's team examined more than 17 000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100 and found three music revolutions - in 1964, 1983 and 1991.
The characteristics they measured included harmony, chord changes and timbre, and how these characteristics changed over time.
In the early 1960s, they found, dominant seventh chords, typical of jazz and blues started to die out as the new British bands - from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones - came in with a new rocky sound.
The second revolution, in 1983, was driven by new technology including synthesisers, samplers and drum machines.
Then in 1991, the third revolution came along with rap and hip-hop. "This revolution is the biggest", explained Dr Mauch. "It is so prominent in our analysis, because we looked at harmony - and rap and hip-hop don't use a lot of harmony. The emphasis is on speech sounds and rhythm. This was a real revolution: suddenly it was possible that you had a pop song without harmony."
See here for the original paper, and here for the pdf. Mauch's team gathered 30-second-long segments from 17 094 songs and measured a range of quantitative audio features, including 12 relating to tone and 14 relating to timbre.
These 26 features were then combined by experts into 'words', and then into 16 ‘topics’ using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and beyond that into 13 'styles', using k-means clustering on principal components of topic frequencies.
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