Know About The Latest Trends In Popular Music

Have you noticed that almost every new song you hear on the radio nowadays sounds miraculously similar to every other "new" song you hear on the radio nowadays? Almost as though there were some uniform formulas for mass-scale commercial success in the music industry framed on the wall of every contemporary producer in the business? Well, if so, it turns out, according to a group of Spanish scientists who have been studying trends in popular music with relatively high-tech equipment and software and whose results have been published in the scientific journal Nature, that your suspicions are not so far off the mark.

Granted, it is doubtful that big shot commercial music producers actually have a framed road-to-success-type formula on their studio walls – so perhaps your intuitions were not spot on in that regard, – but it turns out, according to these Spanish scientists, that over the years popular music has actually been showing a marked decrease in heterogeneity along with a big spike in the volume category. This means that songs are beginning to sound more and more the same, just getting ever louder. Perhaps next on the to-produce list of the music moguls will be a uniform 440hz tone, electronically produced of course, at maximum volume? One cannot be sure.

But enough speculation; on to the hard facts of the study now. These Spanish researchers who I’ve been referring to what they did was they looked at data from the Million Song Dataset, a database at Columbia University with info from over a million songs recorded since the year 1955. What they found was that popular music is getting louder. Meaning take a song from 1960 and play it at the same volume setting on your stereo as a song from 2000 and lo! the 2000 song will make
considerably more noise.

The researchers also found that songs have become increasingly restricted with regard to the extent to which they change pitch. That is, whereas songs of old tended to move about on the musical scales with at least a moderate degree of veracity, songs of late tend to, well, not.

And lastly, the researchers found a homogenization of timbre. This means that not only is there less variety in the actual notes used, but also less variety in the means used to produce these notes. Essentially this means that contemporary music is using less and less instruments to get the music out.