
How music evolves - frrp
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21650444-statistical-analysis-music-reveals-truth-about-its-periods
======
hellbanTHIS
So music really HAS gotten shittier since I was in high school.

But seriously, using the "Billboard Hot 100" is pretty unscientific, that list
says more about mass media than it does about musical styles. For example in
the early 90s there was a lot of independent radio stations fueling that boom
that were gobbled up a few years later. MTV was also huge and was getting
pretty weird with 120 Minutes and Yo MTV Raps. The music being produced hadn't
necessarily changed but more people were suddenly hearing it.

And now because of how schizophrenic everything is, the Hot 100 is a list of
names most people have heard of but nobody actually listens to:
[http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100](http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100)
Okay maybe not NOBODY, but since radio airplay is a key consideration that
list has all kinds of problems.

------
hoopd
In 1991, around one of their "revolutions" the ADAT was released[0]: "While
synchronization had been available in earlier machines, ADAT machines were the
first to do so with sample-accurate timing - which in effect allowed a studio
owner to purchase a 24-track tape machine eight tracks at a time. This
capability and its comparatively low cost, originally introduced at $3995,
were largely responsible for the rise of project studios in the 1990s"

Technological revolutions that have lowered the costs of recording and
distribution have often precipitated changes in the music itself. Not to
mention the new capabilities introduced by new technologies like electric
guitars, magnetic tape recording, sampling, digital recording, and whatever
that robot-death-sounding thing that they keep doing in Dubstep is :)

[0] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT)

~~~
jerf
It isn't clear to me that technology would have affected anything that they
would have picked up:

"Harmonic topics, of which there were eight, captured classes of chord change,
or their absence (eg, “dominant 7th-chord changes” and “major chords without
changes”). Timbral topics, of which there were also eight, were things like
“drums, aggressive, percussive” and “female voice, melodic, vocal”."

I also immediately mentally leaped to "electronic" music, but it doesn't seem
to me that they were looking for that sort of thing.

~~~
hoopd
Look at what blew up in the early 90's: grunge and rap, they were cheaper
forms of the 80's rock and R&B that came before them. Rap probably wouldn't
have happened without the 808 and samplers, and wikipedia puts the first
affordable sampler at 1986 which fits the graph in the article pretty well.

I'm not saying it's all technology but when something is cheap and new that's
an attractive combination for musicians looking for a different sound. And
that new thing will have new strengths and deficiencies which will determine
what types of music sound good on it.

------
agumonkey
Restricted article.

ps: for a reason, printfriendly manage to extract the content
[http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%...](http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fnews%2Fscience-
and-technology%2F21650444-statistical-analysis-music-reveals-truth-about-its-
periods#)

Funny because a quick inspection of the DOM got me nowhere near that content.

~~~
matsiyatzy
Probably because you've used up your "quota" of free economist articles. If
you follow the link in incognito mode, the article is visible.

Also, link to the original paper :
[http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/5/150081](http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/5/150081)

~~~
agumonkey
Didn't know about the quota. Thanks a lot, the paper is far more detailed than
the PF preview.

