http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/5/150081
The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010
Abstract
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 scientific in nature. To rectify this, we
investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music
information retrieval and text-mining tools, we analyse the musical
properties of approximately 17 000 recordings that appeared in the
charts and demonstrate quantitative trends in their harmonic and timbral
properties. We then use these properties to produce an audio-based
classification of musical styles and study the evolution of musical
diversity and disparity, testing, and rejecting, several classical
theories of cultural change. Finally, we investigate whether pop musical
evolution has been gradual or punctuated. We show that, although pop
music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity
during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991. We
conclude by discussing how our study points the way to a quantitative
science of cultural change.
2. Introduction
The history of popular music has long been debated by philosophers, sociologists, journalists, bloggers and pop stars [1–7].
Their accounts, though rich in vivid musical lore and aesthetic
judgements, lack what scientists want: rigorous tests of clear
hypotheses based on quantitative data and statistics. Economics-minded
social scientists studying the history of music have done better, but
they are less interested in music than the means by which it is marketed
[8–15].
The contrast with evolutionary biology—a historical science rich in
quantitative data and models—is striking, the more so because cultural
and organismic variety are both considered to be the result of
modification-by-descent processes [16–19].
Indeed, linguists and archaeologists, studying the evolution of
languages and material culture, commonly apply the same tools that
evolutionary biologists do when studying the evolution of species [20–25].
