Related papers: Measuring the evolution of contemporary western po…
We measure the complexity of songs in the Million Song Dataset (MSD) in terms of pitch, timbre, loudness, and rhythm to investigate their evolution from 1960 to 2010. By comparing the Billboard Hot 100 with random samples, we find that the…
Music is a complex socio-cultural construct, which fascinates researchers in diverse fields, as well as the general public. Understanding the historical development of music may help us understand perceptual and cognition, while also…
Much of Western classical music relies on instruments based on acoustic resonance, which produce harmonic or quasi-harmonic sounds. In contrast, since the mid-twentieth century, popular music has increasingly been produced in recording…
The ubiquity of digital music consumption has made it possible to extract information about modern music that allows us to perform large scale analysis of stylistic change over time. In order to uncover underlying patterns in cultural…
In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than…
How do different musical traditions achieve tonal coherence? Most computational measures to date have analysed tonal coherence in terms of a single dimension, whereas a multi-dimensional analyses have not been sufficiently explored. We…
Understanding music popularity is important not only for the artists who create and perform music but also for the music-related industry. It has not been studied well how music popularity can be defined, what its characteristics are, and…
Western music is predominantly based on the equal temperament with a constant semitone frequency ratio of $2^{1/12}$. Although this temperament has been in use since the 19th century and in spite of its high degree of symmetry, various…
Structure is one of the most essential aspects of music, and music structure is commonly indicated through repetition. However, the nature of repetition and structure in music is still not well understood, especially in the context of music…
This study argues that electronic tones routinely used in contemporary popular music - including 808-style bass and power chords - are structurally and perceptually equivalent to multiphonics in contemporary classical music. Using listening…
If a cultural feature is transmitted over generations and exposed to stochastic selection when spreading in a population, its evolution may be governed by statistical laws and be partly predictable, as in the case of genetic evolution.…
There has been an everlasting discussion around the concept of form in music. This work is motivated by such debate by using a complex systems framework in which we study the form as an emergent property of rhythm. Such a framework…
Aims. This study suggests that the use of multiple perceived pitches arising from a single harmonic complex tone is an active and intentional feature of contemporary popular music. The phenomenon is illustrated through examples drawn from…
Music comprises two core structural components, melody and rhythm, that vary widely across cultures. Whether these components coevolve in a coupled way or follow independent trajectories remains unclear. We introduce a novel computational…
This chapter reconsiders the concept of pitch in contemporary popular music (CPM), particularly in electronic contexts where traditional assumptions may fail. Drawing on phenomenological and inductive methods, it argues that pitch is not an…
Listening habits are strongly influenced by two opposing aspects, the desire for variety and the demand for uniformity in music. In this work we quantify these two notions in terms of musical instrumentation and production technologies that…
Is it possible use algorithms to find trends in the history of popular music? And is it possible to predict the characteristics of future music genres? In order to answer these questions, we produced a hand-crafted dataset with the intent…
Music information retrieval distinguishes between low- and high-level descriptions of music. Current generative AI models rely on text descriptions that are higher level than the controls familiar to studio musicians. Pitch strength, a…
Music, enchanting and poetic, permeates every corner of human civilization. Although music is not unfamiliar to people, our understanding of its essence remains limited, and there is still no universally accepted scientific description.…
We investigate correlations among pitches in several songs and pieces of piano music by mapping them to one-dimensional walks. Two kinds of correlations are studied, one is related to the real values of frequencies while they are treated…