Most debates about pop music may be entirely subjective , but Matthias Mauch , an applied scientist at Queen Mary University of London , decided to take a more scientific coming to the subject . He and a team of colleagues put 17,000 songs spanning 50 years of theBillboard100 list through data point - mining software to generate a quantitative data point rig about the development of what ’s top off the chart .
The computer took birdcall ( the recording label of “ soda water ” is more about popularity than literary genre ) from 1960 to 2010 and measured things like concord and quality . Theresults , published in the Royal Society Open Science journal , prove that it plainly is n’t true that all mass music vocalise the same .
One major finding : Music in the‘80s was a snooze ! That ten was the least divers of any time period in the last half - C .
After Mauch and his team measured concord , timbre , and chord changes , the investigator built a “ fogey record ” that tracked when peculiar stylings were more or less striking . With that data point , the team was able to see the decline of the prevailing 7th chord as idle words and blues faded from the mainstream . In bend , the modest seventh chords recover a position with the dawn of the disco geological era .
The team was also able to spotthree musical revolutionsin 1964 , 1983 , and 1991 . These years strike off magnanimous shifts in the pop euphony world where expressive style changed cursorily . It ’s passably remarkable that a set of data would shine the changes of what was in style from tenner to decade , but the revolutions in the data make total good sense . The British Invasion stormed pop medicine in 1964 , while 1983 ushered in the era of new technology and synthesizers , and in 1991 , rap and hip - hop started to take over . The last switching was the largest , according to Mauch , in part because rap music and pelvic arch - hop are genres with very few harmonies .
There ’s also some great news for those who are banal of pick up people say that all modern papa euphony sounds the same : Science take issue . harmonize to the information , today ’s daddy is just as diverse as ever . So if you must detest on something , you could detest the ‘ LXXX , though my New Order tonne - shirt and I will just keep dance over here .
