According to Reuters, researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched (with the use of complex algorithms), to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010 and found that pop music has indeed become progressively blander, louder and more homogenized.
The study was done by a team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council.
"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse," Serra told Reuters. "In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."
According to Reuters they found that the timbre palette has also become poorer and that intrinsic loudness has also increased (which can make a song sound louder than others played at the same volume level, leading to a kind of cold-war type loudness escalation)
Hank Campbell at SCIENCE 2.0 explains that engineers have been making the music louder because it makes it sound newer and that the effect is achieved through dynamic range compression.
I once asked an old recording engineer why some older music (Toto, Asia) still sounded new (assified, but new) while other songs of the period sounded like they were being played through a tube, and he said it was all dynamic range compression. Engineers discovered music was much 'hotter' the more it was compressed so it went from being a benefit, like in placing a maximum sound level so distortion does not happen or to give an instrument some sustain, to overused for effect and it leaves all the sound flat and just really, really loud.
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For me this report is timely, for just last weekend I watched a cable channel countdown of the week's top music videos and thought I was listening to elevator music, and thought about how poorly it compared to the top-forty stations I grew up with. Every song sounded the same and every song was so bland and boring.
(Oh how I miss WLS of that era when you would hear a Rolling Stones rock tune, followed by a motown tune, followed by the Monkees, followed by an Elvis Presley ballad, followed by a Joan Baez folksong...)
But then I thought, oh man, Williston, you're beginning to sound just like your parents when they complained about the music you listened to.
Have I become a grouchy out-of-it old geezer who just doesn't "get it" (whatever that "it" may be) wanting to cling to the past, I asked myself?
Thank god science, through the use of complex algorithms (what could be more hip and modern than that) has proven that I was not just imagining things, that I was right, and that I might just have a few more years before settling down into hard-core geezerdom.