In her song “Scar,” Australian pop star Missy Higgins asks: “Doesn’t it sound familiar?” Higgins might be closer to the truth than she knows.
Breaking down the audio content and lyrics of music using various algorithms, researchers in Spain discovered pop songs have become increasingly louder and more similar in sound. They used an archive known as the “Million Song Dataset” to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010,.
The more modern a song is, the more likely the variety of chords, melodies and sounds are duller. Plus, current pop music features fewer and fewer different types of sounds.
Joan Serra led the team from the Spanish National Research Institute, telling Reuters, “The diversity of transitions between note combinations — roughly speaking, chords plus melodies — has consistently diminished in the last 50 years.”
The intensity at which songs have been recorded has increased as of late. A song played at the same volume as another, older song can seem noisier if its “intrinsic loudness” is more. This is the first time the volume at which songs are recorded has been measured using a large database.
So, future Lady Gaga and Katy Perry wannabes, make your pop songs loud, with fewer instruments and simple chords, and watch the hits roll in. -Kelsey Fowler
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Kelsey Fowler is the 2012 Features Intern at The Denver Post, currently studying nothing music-related at Ithaca College. Help keep her in the loop on .
