Culture
Spanish researchers did a titanic job analyzing 464411 musical compositions that included almost all styles and musical trends, including rock, pop, hip-pop, heavy rock and many other genres. As a result, scientists came to an amazing conclusion: it turns out that there has been a mixture of styles over the past decades, and the music itself is becoming much louder.
Joan Serra, research leader at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (there is such an institution!) at the US National Research Council, said that the main burden of assessing various parameters of musical compositions was placed on the computer. The musical compositions themselves were selected from a database containing more than one million songs and pieces collected between 1955 and 2010.
As it turned out, the most modern compositions have the least variety of timbres, and there is an interesting trend in using the same musical instruments. In addition, losses and transitions have become more predictable. “The studied musical parameters of the compositions can be compared with the words of a text,” says Serra. According to the scientist's strong conviction, based on the results of the study, our “vocabulary” music is clearly running out…
So, instead of music progressing towards more complex chords, the combination of notes in modern musical compositions is becoming more simple and predictable. It turns out that in the 1960s, musicians were much more willing to experiment with chords and rhythms. Moreover, the music of yesteryear differs from the music of today in the wide variety of musical instruments that musicians once used.
However, this was not the only conclusion regarding the nature of the change in modern music compared to the music of yesteryear. As mentioned above, the music is getting louder (although this fact can hardly be considered an advantage of modern music!). In modern terms, music tends to increase its volume. “The main components of today's music are a combination of simple chords, the most common musical instruments and high volume,” Joan Serra summed up her research.