Pop music too loud and all sounds the same: official(London, July 26, 2012)(Reuters) Comforting news for anyone over the age of 35, scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.
Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.
A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.
So, it’s official. I had my suspicions. Note that the period of the study began with 1955, the year of “Rock Around the Clock.†To read the whole story, go here.