Scientific study proves that today’s pop music sucks

[Sotiris]

Comforting news for anyone over the age of 35, scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.

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, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.

A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.

"We found evidence of a progressive homogenisation 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."

They also found the so-called timbre palette has become poorer. The same note played at the same volume on, say, a piano and a guitar is said to have a different timbre, so the researchers found modern pop has a more limited variety of sounds.

Intrinsic loudness is the volume baked into a song when it is recorded, which can make it sound louder than others even at the same volume setting on an amplifier.

The music industry has long been accused of ramping up the volume at which songs are recorded in a 'loudness war' but Serra says this is the first time it has been properly measured using a large database.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/ ... 3320120726

[pap64]

Not aimed at you Sotiris, but at the research team

[Disney's Divinity]

Listen to 30 seconds of Katy Perry's "Peacock," and you'll know what suck sounds like. (I'd ask you to listen to more, but I'm not that cruel.)

[carolinakid]

I know I prefer any pop music before the year 2000.

[TheValentineBros]

I prefer pop from the 1980s. Anything starting from the '90s to present day suck, except for probably the later works of both Michael Jackson or Rick Astley.

[Lazario]

Not aimed at you Sotiris, but at the research team

Agreed.

Technically, none of this is news. People have known about the issue of louder recorded music for years. However, I've been told it's only the fact that it's recorded louder that compromises the music's actual quality. That during this process, range and nuance is reduced. But that it actually exists before final recording. So, the people writing and performing the music are still doing their jobs well. Their music is just the victim of bad industry decisions.

[Avaitor]

It's not even limited to pop music. Listen an album Rick Rubin produced in the 80's or 90's, and compare it to one he took care of in the past few years- Chili Peppers, Metallica, Slayer, Slipknot, Adele, your pick- and you can notice that he's been following the same trend as the pop industry.

[Super Aurora]

Scientists wasting tax collector's money and their time on pointless and useless "research".

[Lazario]

Basically agreed.

Even if there was something we could do about this, make our music sound better and more even thereby getting more richness and wholeness out of the louder new tracks, wouldn't we have to go re-buy songs after they were fixed? Who wants to do that?