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Big Data Confirms Rap Was the Biggest Innovation in Pop Since 1960

Researchers quantified the features of American Billboard Hot 100 songs over 50 years.

Just as sports have advanced analytics to counterbalance drive-time narrative speculators, music has just taken a long drink from the well of big data.

Researchers from Queen Mary University in London tapped into 50 years of Last.fm's data on the American Billboard Hot 100 chart to look at trends in style and diversity, from 1960 up to 2010. Drawing off of 30-second clips of 17,094 songs, they measured "a series of quantitative audio features," to see whether the songs registered on "harmonic topics"—like whether the songs have "dominant 7th chord changes"—and "timbre topics", such as whether the songs were "calm, quiet, mellow" or "drums, aggressive, percussive."

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"For the first time we can measure musical properties in recordings on a large scale. We can actually go beyond what music experts tell us, or what we know ourselves about them, by looking directly into the songs, measuring their makeup, and understanding how they have changed," said Matthias Mauch, lead author of the paper, in a statement.

It also gives researchers at least a rough way of tracking the rise and fall of some genres and some strange musical features. For instance, that dominant 7th chord—which sounds sort of jazzy or bluesy to the modern pop ear, but can also sound sort of dissonant if it's not resolved neatly—is in a 50-year decline, which can be interpreted as the decline of blues and jazz from the Hot 100. The rise and fall of funk and soul can be found by looking at minor 7th chord changes, which predictably peaks in the late 70s. Disco, as it turns out, never really died, but rock really did have a terrible 90s.

The researchers were also able to chart when music changed dramatically.

According to the paper. "the rate of musical change—slow-to-fast—is represented by the colour gradient blue, green, yellow, red, brown: 1964, 1983, and 1991 are periods of particularly rapid musical change."

"The rise of rap and related genres appears to be the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts."

This is pretty interesting: In 1964, rock bands rose at the expense of doo-wop. In 1983, new wave, disco, and hard rock-related tags rise at the expense of soft rock, country, or soul and RnB-related ones.

But no change is as dramatic as the rise of hip hop. By charting the rise of the timbre "energetic, speech, bright" and of music with fewer chords—which seems a little misleading since the seminal hip hop track, "Rapper's Delight," has an immediately recognizable chord progression—you can see the world change as the 80s turn into the 90s

"The rise of rap and related genres appears, then, to be the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts in the period that we studied," the paper states.The results of the researchers' work appears in Royal Society Open Science. At this point it's almost more interesting imagining what we could soon be able to ask the data.

Techniques like these can be used to quantify whether or not Terry Teachout was right to say that the love song is on the decline in the pop charts, whether music is getting more homogenous (this data says it isn't), or perhaps even whether we can expect another Nirvana.