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Jon Timbrook
This will be a three part series over the next 3-blog posts. Blog 5, 6, and 7
Article: <http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/5/150081#F3>
Introduction/Preface
I was talking with a friend about possible topics to write about for my blog, and she suggested I write about “pop music’s decline to complete shit.” I’m pretty sure she was halfway kidding, but I couldn’t agree with her more. What happed to the days were popular music wasn’t the kind of music that made you want to jerk the wheel of your car into oncoming traffic? I set out to discover, what happened to popular music?
After close reading and studying of, “The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010” a scholarly journal by authors Mathias Mauch, Robert M MacCallum, and Mark Levy, published May 6, 2015, and using Billboard.com/charts/hot100, and the Last.Fm webpage; the authors point out that there are apparent stylistic and harmonic changes that help us track the evolution of popular music in the United States between 1960 and 2010. You will soon find out some of the specific tamboral qualities that can be traced as either rising, becoming rarer, or even cycling in and out through the billboards hot 100 songs as the years go by. My job today will be to explain my thoughts about popular music styles and changes, as well as offer my opinion about the direction of popular music post 2010.
The first thing the article made very clear was that popular music evolution is punctuated by musical revolutions, which can be traced back to years 1963-Q4, 1982-Q4, and 1991-Q1. Although there are smaller less intense musical revolutions along the way, these three periods mark the 3 most drastic changes (GRAPH). The graph shows the intensity of the change of musical styles by color. (focusing on the bottom graph of the 2)
As you can see, the areas of the most diversity of styles (discussed in the next blog) The authors of the study estimate the magnitude of change in a given window by graphing the frequency change in popular music’s diversity of tones, style, harmonics, timbre, topic diversity and disparity. Close evaluation of the graphs and style changes can give us an idea of when popular music seemed to be the least diverse, and in what areas, so that we can trace what those styles are and what they might have influenced future genres or even never show up again.
It should be common knowledge that all songs on the top 100 have an ancestor/descendant relationship arising from songwriters imitating their predecessors. Styles and genres, then, represent populations of music that have evolved unique characters (topics), or combinations of characters, in partial geographical or cultural isolation (e.g. country in southern USA during the 20’s or Rap in the South Bronx of the the article70’s). The rise and fall of styles’ frequency over time is in response to changing musical tastes in everybody from songwriters, to musicians, to producers, who are in turn influenced by the audience (Mauch, MacCallum, Levy; 2015).
In the next blog I will share with you the most significant style types and explain what kind of music they may be found in and try why.
