Many of us have either heard or expressed ourselves about the degradation of modern music. Tracks from the top charts are becoming less expressive and more similar to each other every year, and the Internet is full of endless "Cadillacs" and "fendi hoodies. It turned out that this is not a retrograde delusion, but a fact that has long been scientifically proven.

Wealth

Scientists from the Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Barcelona back in 2012 conducted a large-scale study, analyzing changes in popular Western music from 1955 to 2010. They used the "One Million Songs" database, running almost 500 thousand tracks through statistical algorithms. The main parameters for the study were harmonic complexity, timbre diversity and loudness.

Temporal diversity is composed of the number of instruments used and the vocal range. If it is quite simple, it characterizes the "depth" and "richness" of the work. It turned out that in recent decades, the tonal diversity in popular music has decreased significantly.

Tonal Diversity Comparison Schedule

Originality

The decrease in originality has also been statistically proven. Most of today's tracks are built on virtually the same combination of keys, dram-machine and sampler. Scientists were particularly interested in the so-called "millennial scream". Hundreds of artists use the same transition from the fifth stage in major to the third and back to the fifth. Most often, this combination is accompanied by the words: "Wow, wow".

“Millennial Scream" sheet music transcription

This technique is one of the simplest forms of so-called hooks. These are musical and vocal algorithms that are designed to hook and make you listen to the song again. The hooks can be divided into negative and positive.

Positive ones are most often characterized by noticeable, but not sharp differences from the basic harmony, originality and precisely verified repetition timings. Examples of positive hooks are the loss of the song In my time of dying Led Zeppelin or the word Yesterday in the song of the same name by Paul McCartney.

Negative hooks have as many inappropriate repetitions as possible and a primitive structure. The first time such names were used in Desmond Bagley's 1978 novel "The Free". The song, saturated with such "worms" remains in the head for a long time, for a short time becomes familiar and makes you listen to the composition again and again. The brain is organized in such a way that in most cases it does not like everything new, because for its perception and assimilation it requires much more resources than for the same actions with familiar phenomena.

In recent decades, the number of negative hooks in popular music has increased many times. This is due to changes in access technologies. Previously, analogue media were used, people were more attentive to listening and the struggle for attention between labels was not so sharp. Now people have instant access to millions of songs, and manufacturers need to capture attention instantly and as effectively as possible, so that the consumer does not flip through the front as long as possible, and ideally comes back again. This trend in high values has also led to the primitivization and similarity of a huge number of popular tracks.

Lyrics

The variety of poetry has similarly decreased. The researchers applied the Flash Kincaid Readability Index to the lyrics of popular songs written from 2005 to 2014. The algorithm shows the complexity of the work for perception and measures the literary skill. During the selected period, the index value has fallen by half a point, the number of repetitions of the same words increased, and the texts themselves have become shorter.

One of the reasons  is that most of the world hits of the last twenty years are authored by two people ー Max Martin and Lukash Gottwald. They wrote for Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and many others.

Volume

Over the last decades, it has become very common to use the simple and very effective method ー to amplify loudness with compression, i.e. to reduce the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds. This method allows the listener to hold the attention longer, but makes the whole composition less expressive. The drum parts are less emphasized and the difference in timbre is smoothed out.

How did it happen? 

Of course, nobody wanted to reduce the quality of music to dull the population. The reasons for degradation are mainly market-based. The global devaluation led to the rise in price of any projects, including those in the media sector. Following the cost, the risks also increased. Large labels spend a huge amount of man-hours and resources to create the most averaged product that the absolute majority of people will like, and proven methods are used over and over again. Hence the endless repetitions, the decrease in depth and expressiveness. But this does not mean that all music is degraded. We are only talking about commercial projects. Thanks to the Internet, the field of independent music has received a powerful breakthrough, which allowed many talented musicians on royalty free music platforms to show their work to millions of people - which was impossible for most of them 15 years ago. So there is no need to despair.

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