“Well, we’re all in the mood for a tune,” said Billy Joel on “Piano Man,” the iconic 1973 bar ballad. That may have been true enough when Mr. Joel was wearing younger clothes, but a new study conducted by computational musicologists at Queen Mary University of London found that vocal melodies in popular music have become much less complex over time.
The study, was published on On Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, he used mathematical models and algorithms to identify three “melodic revolutions” — in 1975, 1996 and 2000 — that brought increasing simplicity to the two main components of melody: the rhythm or pattern of sounds and of silences in a piece of music, and pitch, the measure of how high or low the notes are.
The study looked at Billboard’s top five songs each year from 1950 to 2023. Both rhythm and pitch became steadily less complex during that time, the study found. “Conservatively, both decreased by 30 percent,” said Madeline Hamilton, a graduate student at Queen Mary University who led the research.
Captain & Tennille’s 1975 hit “Love Will Keep Us Together” contains many unexpected notes and rhythmic complexity.
“Breathe” by Faith Hill, the top song of 2000, has no coincidences, many repetitions and simple rhythms.
Simplifying melody is not a new concern for some musicologists. “The place of melody as one of the basic building blocks of music is greatly diminished,” composer Yuval Shrem he wrote in a 2014 article for Keyboard magazine, which was reported in the study. But new research adds rigorous quantitative evidence to this trend.
Ms Hamilton and her adviser, Marcus Pearce, head of the Music Cognition Lab at Queen Mary University, found that other aspects of popular music, such as the number of notes played per second, actually increased over time, suggesting that the loss of melodic complexity amounted to a kind of compromise. The change may be due to technological advances.
“Today, with the accessibility of digital music production software and libraries of millions of samples and loops, anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can create any sound imaginable,” the researchers wrote.
They cautioned against making value judgments about the loss of melody, as the trend can easily fall prey to culture war narratives about classical versus contemporary music, they said in an interview.
“It’s not that music is getting less complicated,” Ms. Hamilton said. “The melody gets less complicated, but maybe the chords get more complicated, or maybe the production.”
Melodies tend to be pleasing to the ear, so we find ourselves humming the opening bars of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5” or “Poker Face,” Lady Gaga’s hit from 2008.
“The melody often has the clearest potential to be the heart and soul of a piece of music,” said Oscar Osicki, a composer who runs Inside the score, a YouTube channel about music. “It is what draws us in, stirs our emotions, and allows our souls to dance along its outline.”
As Ms. Hamilton began researching melodic aesthetics in 2019 in preparation for writing a dissertation, she encountered a deficit that would dominate her career for years to come. “I noticed that all the datasets available were classical and popular music, which I thought was kind of odd,” he said. “That’s not really representative of what people hear every day.”
Ms. Hamilton decided to compile a data set of her own using it Billboard Melodic Music Datasetwhich includes 1,131 tune files from the top five Billboard songs for every year from 1950 to 2022. (Ms. Hamilton single-handedly topped last year’s hits, led by Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night.”)
He listened to all 366 songs in the database and transcribed the vocal melodies — about three per song — into MuseScore, an online music notation program.
At the time, London was under coronavirus lockdown and Ms Hamilton spent much of her time alone in a dormitory, listening to tunes for up to 10 hours each day. Today, still scarred by the experience, she can’t listen to much popular music, although no song haunts her more than UB40’s cover of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which took third place. the year-end Billboard chart in 1993.
Ms. Hamilton measured eight melodic metrics, four related to tempo and four related to pitch, for each melody of every Billboard song in the data set. These included, for example, the number of notes per bar and the average melodic interval between successive bars. Roger Deana molecular biologist, musicologist and composer at the University of Western Sydney in Australia, offered crucial help, as well as what Ms Hamilton called “sanity checks”.
Ms Hamilton also used a statistical model developed by Dr Pearce to measure how predictable each melody was in both tempo and pitch. “The model ‘guess’ which note will appear next in the melody based on the previous notes in the melody,” Ms Hamilton said. “It then returns a value that represents how ‘surprised’ the model was on average over the entire tune.”
Ms. Hamilton then used algorithms used by linguists to study changes in language use to reveal the timing of important moments in the evolution of pop. He found that melodic sophistication fell off sharply in 1975, when disco and stadium rock took over. A somewhat less steep decline followed in 1996, following the growing appeal of hip-hop and electronic music, along with the popularity of MTV. Another major melodic cliff appeared in 2000, likely a product of the same forces at work during the 1990s.
Digital culture, including social media, may also have made people more accustomed to smaller units of information. “As our brains become accustomed to reading and writing broken sentences in order to fit into the various digital character boundaries, our brains end up not expecting, demanding, or even craving the fully formed sentence, musically or otherwise,” he wrote. Mr. Shrem. 2014 article about the keyboard.
Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” the number one song of 2014, had high production values but low melodic complexity.
But others say the move away from melodic variety makes sense because the human mind can only handle so much complexity. As music became more innovative in some ways thanks to the proliferation of digital tools and cultural changes, it had to sacrifice creative nuance elsewhere, he said. Patrick Savagemusicologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
“We can’t enjoy things that are too complex to understand, remember or reproduce,” he said. “There are some sort of boundaries there.” Dr Savage added that one of the limitations of the new study was that it could not fully account for the specific complexity of rap music. “Western notation was not designed to capture the speech-like microtonalities of rap, which in some respects are arguably more complex than typical sung melodies,” he said.
Ms Hamilton agreed that melodic complexity was not an indicator of musical quality. “Simplicity,” he said, “has its own beauty.”
