Tópico: ‘80s Music is Boring, According to Science

[Barata Tenno]

‘80s Music is Boring, According to Science

Most debates about pop music may be entirely subjective, but Matthias Mauch, an engineer at Queen Mary University of London, decided to take a more scientific approach to the subject. He and a team of colleagues put 17,000 songs spanning 50 years of the Billboard 100 list through data-mining software to generate a quantitative data set about the evolution of what’s topping the charts.

The computer took songs (the label of “pop” is more about popularity than genre) from 1960 to 2010 and measured things like harmony and timbre. The results, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, prove that it simply isn’t true that all mass music sounds the same.

One major finding: Music in the ‘80s was a snooze! That decade was the least diverse of any time period in the last half-century.

After Mauch and his team measured harmony, timbre, and chord changes, the researchers built a “fossil record” that tracked when particular stylings were more or less prominent. With that data, the team was able to see the decline of the dominant 7th chords as jazz and blues faded from the mainstream. In turn, the minor seventh chords found a place with the dawn of the disco era.

The team was also able to spot three musical revolutions in 1964, 1983, and 1991. These years marked large shifts in the pop music world where styles changed quickly. It’s pretty remarkable that a set of data would reflect the changes of what was in vogue from decade to decade, but the revolutions in the data make total sense. The British Invasion stormed pop music in 1964, while 1983 ushered in the era of new technology and synthesizers, and in 1991, rap and hip-hop started to take over. The last shift was the largest, according to Mauch, in part because rap and hip-hop are genres with very few harmonies.

There’s also some great news for those who are tired of hearing people say that all modern pop music sounds the same: Science disagrees. According to the data, today’s pop is just as diverse as ever. So if you must hate on something, you can hate the ‘80s, though my New Order t-shirt and I will just keep dancing over here.

Fonte
Fonte para o estudo

[Digão]

Da matéria original:

Mid-to-late 1980s became most homogenous period in music over the last 50 years, based on the team’s computer analysis. This theme doesn’t mean music from this era was bad, but rather it suggests “a small number of styles were very catchy and therefore dominated,” Pagel said.

Isso faz mais sentido do que dizer que a música dos anos 80 era "entediante".

Ainda do artigo original:

Harmonies are the musical chords that define a song’s melody.

Essa frase está erradíssima.

The second landmark movement in 1983 came with the adoption of aggressive, synthesized percussion — think Phil Collins and his pulsating drum machine — and loud, guitar-heavy Arena rock with lots of chord changes, such as with Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon, Queen, Kiss and Alice Cooper. These rock bands were joined by new wave acts — like the Police and Cyndi Lauper — plus a surge of metronomic dance-pop heroes like Madonna and the Pet Shop Boys. (Michael Jackson’s Thriller dropped in late-1982).

Eu quase não ouvia rock nessa época, então não tenho parâmetros para avaliar essa afirmação. Queria saber a impressão de outros foristas a respeito dessa "revolução" de 1983 no campo das guitarras e o que diferencia esse rock do rock de anos anteriores.

Do estudo original:

Because our aim is to investigate the evolution of popular taste, we did not attempt to obtain a representative sample of all the songs that were released in the USA in that period of time, but just those that were most commercially successful.

É um resultado interessante e para muitos surpreendente que o gosto musical não tenha declinado. Mesmo assim temos a constatação empírica de que as músicas mais ouvidas são harmonica e melodicamente simples. Se o estudo focasse nesse aspecto (ele não focou em melodia, somente em harmonia e timbre), talvez pudesse levar à conclusão de que o gosto musical popular é assim porque se tratam de construções musicais que o cérebro processa com menos esforço - em contraste com harmonias e melodias tidas como mais "refinadas". Já o timbre não parece ser algo que o cérebro se esforça em processar - pelo contrário, o ouvido popular está sempre aberto a novos timbres, como as citadas guitarras e percussões sintetizadas de 83, a dependência alta de timbres sintetizados que se constata nas músicas mais ouvidas atualmente, a popularidade do dubstep entre os jovens. Mas dependência aqui não quer dizer dominação e sim combinação com sons mais naturais.

[Barata Tenno]

Eu não tenho idéia do que você disse, mas foi tão complicado que eu estou tendendo a concordar com você. 

[Digão]

 

[Geotecton]

Kiss, Van Halen e Queen com percussão sintetizada?

Sim, em um ou outro segmento de alguma faixa esporádica. Mas isto nunca foi a regra destas bandas. Pelo contrário.

[Moro]

A ciência não sabe nada então

[Digão]

Na verdade ao citar essas bandas o texto se refere ao "loud, guitar-heavy Arena rock". Já a percussão sintetizada é atribuída a "Phil Collins and his pulsating drum machine".

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Música composta com a intenção de ser a preferida por todo o mundo, através do método científico:

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/McIfIx29tSg" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/McIfIx29tSg</a>

[Geotecton]

Na verdade ao citar essas bandas o texto se refere ao "loud, guitar-heavy Arena rock". Já a percussão sintetizada é atribuída a "Phil Collins and his pulsating drum machine".

Sim é isto o que o texto expõe, lendo-o corretamente.

De qualquer modo, o senhor Collins não teria a grande luz própria que teve se o senhor Gabriel não tivesse saído da banda Gênesis.