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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…
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…
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…
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…
Music has always been central to human culture, reflecting and shaping traditions, emotions, and societal changes. Technological advancements have transformed how music is created and consumed, influencing tastes and the music itself. In…
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…
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…
We present a technique to search for the presence of crucial events in music, based on the analysis of the music volume. Earlier work on this issue was based on the assumption that crucial events correspond to the change of music notes,…
Statistical modeling of popular music presents a unique challenge due to the complexity of song structures, which cannot be easily analyzed using conventional statistical tools. However, recent advances in data science have shown that…
Since the creation of the Billboard Hot 100 music chart in 1958, the chart has been a window into the music consumption of Americans. Which songs succeed on the chart is decided by consumption volumes, which can be affected by consumer…
We report a statistical analysis over more than eight thousand songs. Specifically, we investigate the probability distribution of the normalized sound amplitudes. Our findings seems to suggest a universal form of distribution which…
Based on a review of anecdotal beliefs, we explored patterns of track-sequencing within professional music albums. We found that songs with high levels of valence, energy and loudness are more likely to be positioned at the beginning of…
Does popular music from the 60s sound different than that of the 90s? Prior study has shown that there would exist some variations of patterns and regularities related to instrumentation changes and growing loudness across multi-decadal…
This paper presents a comprehensive computational framework for analyzing linguistic complexity and socio-cultural trends in hip-hop lyrics. Using a dataset of 3,814 songs from 146 influential artists spanning four decades (1980-2020), we…
The number of possible melodies is unfathomably large, yet despite this virtually unlimited potential for melodic variation, melodies from different societies can be surprisingly similar. The motor constraint hypothesis accounts for certain…
Nowadays we are often faced with huge databases resulting from the rapid growth of data storage technologies. This is particularly true when dealing with music databases. In this context, it is essential to have techniques and tools able to…
Music popularity prediction has garnered significant attention in both industry and academia, fuelled by the rise of data-driven algorithms and streaming platforms like Spotify. This study aims to explore the predictive power of various…
Existing computational studies of popular music primarily model aggregate trends or predict chart performance, offering limited support for interpreting artist-level alignment against historical stylistic baselines. We introduce an…
We propose string compressibility as a descriptor of temporal structure in audio, for the purpose of determining musical similarity. Our descriptors are based on computing track-wise compression rates of quantised audio features, using…
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…