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      Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music

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          Abstract

          Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness.

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          Most cited references15

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          Content-Based Music Information Retrieval: Current Directions and Future Challenges

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            Musical rhythm spectra from Bach to Joplin obey a 1/f power law.

            Much of our enjoyment of music comes from its balance of predictability and surprise. Musical pitch fluctuations follow a 1/f power law that precisely achieves this balance. Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are considered highly regular and predictable, and this predictability has been hypothesized to underlie rhythm's contribution to our enjoyment of music. Are musical rhythms indeed entirely predictable and how do they vary with genre and composer? To answer this question, we analyzed the rhythm spectra of 1,788 movements from 558 compositions of Western classical music. We found that an overwhelming majority of rhythms obeyed a 1/f(β) power law across 16 subgenres and 40 composers, with β ranging from ∼0.5-1. Notably, classical composers, whose compositions are known to exhibit nearly identical 1/f pitch spectra, demonstrated distinctive 1/f rhythm spectra: Beethoven's rhythms were among the most predictable, and Mozart's among the least. Our finding of the ubiquity of 1/f rhythm spectra in compositions spanning nearly four centuries demonstrates that, as with musical pitch, musical rhythms also exhibit a balance of predictability and surprise that could contribute in a fundamental way to our aesthetic experience of music. Although music compositions are intended to be performed, the fact that the notated rhythms follow a 1/f spectrum indicates that such structure is no mere artifact of performance or perception, but rather, exists within the written composition before the music is performed. Furthermore, composers systematically manipulate (consciously or otherwise) the predictability in 1/f rhythms to give their compositions unique identities.
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              Automatic genre classification of music content: a survey

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                26 July 2012
                2012
                : 2
                : 521
                Affiliations
                [1 ]simpleArtificial Intelligence Research Institute, Spanish National Research Council (IIIA-CSIC) , Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
                [2 ]simpleComplex Systems Group, Centre de Recerca Matemàtica , Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
                [3 ]simpleDepartament de Física Fonamental, Universitat de Barcelona , Barcelona, Spain
                [4 ]simpleMusic Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra , Barcelona, Spain
                Author notes
                Article
                srep00521
                10.1038/srep00521
                3405292
                22837813
                b51ddf0f-2570-4833-898e-5ccdca8ee885
                Copyright © 2012, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

                History
                : 11 May 2012
                : 04 July 2012
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