Do you think the quality of the songs has gotten worse in recent years? Scientists agree with you

People often complain that the level of songs is getting worse year after year and repeat: “It’s not like it used to be!” But is music nowadays really that bad? Maybe it’s just a myth, perhaps inspired by the nostalgia that invades us. Or maybe it’s true. We researched the subject and found that the answer has already been given by science.

O awesome.club presents the results of a different and curious study, which in many ways confirms the opinion that for several decades something strange has been happening with music.

Scientists at the Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence in Barcelona, ​​Spain, under the direction of Joan Serrà, analyzed the evolution of popular Western music from 1955 to 2010. In their work, published in the respected scientific journal Nature, Serrà and his colleagues used a database consisting of a million songs (Million Song Dataset), a 280 GB public archive, which contains compositions by approximately 45,000 artists.

The main parameters that interested the scientists were the timbre, the tonality and the volume of the songs. Of course, it’s not the volume you can adjust while listening to music, but the one related to the characteristics of sound recording. They found that the amplitude of the audio signal increased by adding one decibel every 8 years. As a result, modern music has really become very loud, which tends to make it lose some nuances. This could be the reason our grandmothers complain, right?

“All music sounds the same!”

This common complaint has also found its scientific confirmation. According to the researchers, the peak of music originality dropped in the 1960s, and then the variety of timbres began to steadily reduce. Likewise, it happened with tonality. Popular song writers choose the same tried-and-true chords and note combinations when creating compositions, which makes their works become increasingly similar to each other.

Another characteristic of contemporary music is that many compositions seem incomplete; obviously they lack the final chord. And that’s not just because music has become so much simpler, but because this kind of music is better memorized, no matter how stupid it may sound – it’s a kind of ‘bubblegum effect’, the songs that stick in your head. . Our brain tries to find the ending to an incomplete melody, over and over, bringing it back to mind. In this way, this characteristic in current songs doesn’t happen by chance, but responds to a more than clever marketing trick.

Is there any way to improve modern music? In Joan Serrà’s opinion, this can be done by rewriting old songs and taking into account contemporary requirements. That is, to make old songs impregnated with novelty, it is necessary to remove some “extra” chords and make them sound at a higher volume.

Currently, it is common to make remakes and often one comes out that becomes very popular, especially for those people who have never heard the original version. Meanwhile, seasoned music lovers complain: “They ruined this great song!”

Sometimes, however, the opposite happens. For example, music “I’ll always love you”, performed by Whitney Houston, was an even bigger sales success than the original version by Dolly Parton, presented in 1974.