Spanish scientists
Backing up what we all know
Quote:
26 July 2012
News: Pop Is Rubbish
Modern music is louder and it all sounds the same, say scientists
OH DEAR. Looks like your parents were right all along — modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same, according to scientists in Spain.
A team of researchers led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran tunes from the past 50 years through an archive called the Million Song Dataset, which uses complex algorithms to analyse audio and lyrical content from tracks.
The results sound like a jargon-riddled version of something your average Q reader might say down a squat-rave in Peckham.
“We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse,” Serra told Reuters. “In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations — roughly speaking chords plus melodies — has consistently diminished in the last 50 years.”
Translation: “It isn’t ‘proper’ music, though, is it?”
As well as a steady increase in the volume built into tracks through the years, the team also found that modern pop draws on a poorer palette of timbres for its sound — ‘timbre’ referring to the quality of a given note which may vary from instrument to instrument.
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