Every time I hear contemporary music and I don’t like it, I lightly assume that it is because it is not the music that marked the milestones of my now middle-aged life. But when I mull over it, I really want to know, to flake what is it about the music these days that slides over my memory — making brain parts, hardly making a ripple at all. Is it the themes of the music? Melody? Instrumentation?
I am fairly keen on music. I had enough interest in it to ask my mother when I was 12, if I could take classical voice instead for six hours a week when over 95 percent of my high school batch took typing, painting or cooking. It was a lot for her to shell out considering we were on a really tight budget. But she never even asked me to reconsider. I hope she saw how excited I was every time I learned a new song that I could sing right from the sheet. We learned Italian arias, kundiman, Broadway music and American jazz. I was learning those while consistently attending and loving the pop music concerts of Basil Valdez singing the songs of George Canseco and Ryan Cayabyab and of course listening to songs by Burt Bacharach which my parents heavily exposed us to, including those of James Taylor, Carole King and Don McLean. That was the pop scoring of my childhood and adolescence — the mental backdrop against which the music of this generation plays when I turn the radio on. So how do the songs now score against those?
Researchers in Spain studied almost half a million songs circa 1955 to 2010 and came up with some insights as to what has happened to pop music. This was contained in a study reported in Scientific Reports last July 26 entitled “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music” by Joan Serra, Alvaro Corral, Marian Boguña, Martin Haro and Josep Ll. Arcos. Those 500,000 songs were done by 45,000 artists and their timbre, pitch and loudness were studied.
Timbre refers to the texture and tone quality, its richness; pitch refers to the tonal arrangements, chords, and melody; and loudness is the audio signal during recording and storage of the music (not the volume at which pop music is played). With timbre, the researchers found that the timbre of popular peaked in the 60s and it was sort of downhill from there with less instrumentation and recording techniques. When it came to pitch, the study found that it stayed constant and did not change much. But in the area of loudness, pop music is generally being recorded and installed in increasing loudness, about a decibel a year!
Yes! I am not imagining it. At least as far as these three musical elements are concerned, pop music now really has less of a net to capture my imagination than pop music of my generation had. It is because, at least based on this study, pop music these days is at best, mostly a rehashed, louder version of pop music before. It turns out there is not much novelty and leaps in pitch and timbre to warrant a soulful engagement with my radio station that is equal to the ones I had when I was growing up.
There is a also related study I wrote about this year that found out that pop music now is much more focused on “Me, Myself and I” and less on our collective spirit as human beings which to me is the absolute turn-off since music a magnificent meme, a dance of one’s “soul” that is expansive and passed on. I find it too suffocating to be passed on “me music.” I cannot explain it but I can feel this obsession with self in the timbre and pitch of most pop music now even if there were no lyrics.
The study only focused on pop music. It ended with encouragement to other researchers to examine other genres of music to see where they are in the evolving story of music around the world.
Now, when you turn on your radio now, would you listen to current pop music the same way?
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