Study Finds Current Pop Music too Loud and Unoriginal

According to a recent study performed by the Spanish National Research Council involving a computer analysis of popular music recorded between 1955 and 2010, the loudness of music today takes away from its originality and uniqueness, making 21^st century hit tunes rather "bland."

Researchers led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra in Spain used a large archive known as the Million Song Dataset to break down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched and therefore closely studied. According to the results, "pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used." Not only that, but modern pop music was found to have a more limited variety of sounds compared to hits from back in the day.

The Council, which published its findings in the journal Scientific Reports last week, studied a variety of music genres, including rock, pop, hip hop, metal, and electronic.

Serra spoke to Reuters and said, "We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse. In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."

The study sums itself up with, "Much of the gathered evidence points towards an important degree of conventionalism, in the sense of blockage or no-evolution, in the creation and production of contemporary Western popular music."

Basically, researchers believe that current music producers have become too accustomed to "vamping up" the volume of individual songs, focusing primarily on competing in a 'loudness war.' Serra insists that this practice of recording songs louder also leads to the contemporizing of older songs - using more common chord changes and altering the song's instrumentation. And that is the popular sound that has become the norm of today.

Serra states this is the first time pop music has been properly measured using such a large database as Million Song Dataset.

Check out the study's findings (with better and more in-depth scientific explanation) here.