Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023.

ABSTRACT: In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify "melodic revolutions", changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. Two major revolutions in

SUBMITTER: Hamilton M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11224395 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature