[planetguy]

What I'd like to see is a plot of the number of chords used in a song versus time. Possibly even broken down by genre, or correlated to other qualities (sex of singer) et cetera.

If you start at the 1950s, you'll see very simple rock songs; your classic three-chord rock songs. As you hit the 1960s you'll see more complexity; The Beatles, for instance, had more harmonic complexity than what had come before, which continues to be imitated into the 1970s. Then what happens? I don't know, by the 1980s you're looking at a lot of very simple music again, though music is becoming more diverse genre-wise so you're probably getting a larger spread. Then by the present day you have a disturbing trend of one-chord or even no-chord music; apart from rap [which contains no singing but seems to have got simpler even in the backing tracks over the years] we now find that even sung songs are completely lacking in harmony or chord progression. A particularly annoying example I noticed the other day would be that song (dunno who it's by) with the lyrics "We found love in a hopeless place", which seems to have a melody of just four notes.

I could continue this discussion going backwards in time from the 1950s and talking about how the ever-growing harmonic sophistication of art music through Beethoven to Wagner eventually led to a complete breakdown of the idea of harmony in art music which led to music that nobody liked which led to the death of art music and the establishment of rock and roll from square one, but that's another discussion.

[decklin]

If you're interested in learning music theory (as I am currently) and how the the Beatles' music evolved, this series of articles by Alan W. Pollack is fantastic:

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-notes_...

They were originally Usenet postings(!) starting in 1989 or thereabouts, but have been revised a bit. Warning: you could lose hours reading through them all.

One thing that comes up many times there that I'd be interested in seeing added to a quantitative analysis like this one is how many times something can "seem" like it might be in one key but ends up really being in another, but I don't know how you would count that.

[planetguy]

Wow, I just read through a couple of those and they look fantastic. I'll bookmark that and read it sometime later.

[madhadron]

Harmonic sophistication is a...fraught term. There were jazz musicians who developed a style based on 1 chord, but it needn't be harmonically simple. Ever tried riffing off a humming appliance? It's really fun. I used to do it while waiting for my laundry, since the washers all hummed at the same pitch. When it's you and a fixed tone, your harmonic palette starts opening up in wild ways. Microtones creep in, and new decoration schemes.

You also have to be careful because Bach and Purcell didn't think in terms of our modern harmonic structure. They worked in voicing and figured base, which produces similar, but not identical, results. Go back a little farther, and it's all voicing. Palestrina in in some ways closer to Schoenberg than Haydn.

As for the breakdown of harmony in art music, not so much. Serialism got all the academic and theoretical attention, and many mediocre composers with a theoretical bent worked in it, and a few great composers like Stravinsky and Shostakovitch, but it's hardly all the art music that was being composed. Many composers got through their whole careers without any particular use of it, such as Walter Piston. What that has to do with rock and roll is a mystery to me, since it's an offshoot of jazz, which is alive and well and still serving as a wellspring for new music.

[wheels]

Your analysis is overly dismissive of genres that you presumably don't like. Simplistic pop songs aren't a new phenomenon; they were just as present in the 60s as they are now. We just don't listen to them anymore as they haven't stood the test of time. This was abundantly evident last weekend when I went through a stack of about 100 45s from the 60s and early 70s that I inherited. (My father was a radio DJ during the time.) I'd never heard of 90% of the bands, despite already owning hundreds of albums from the period. The same will be true of the music that's popular now in a few decades.

Also, using harmonic progression alone as a measure of musical complexity or richness is misguided. Steve Reich's Violin Phase contains only 5 notes, but was a seminal piece of minimalist music in the 1960s:

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Violin+Phase/3nPoC4?src=5

Musical richness can come from a lot of places. Hip-hop, as a genre, tends to focus on rhythmic texture and narative content. I'd say, on average, pop hip-hop these days is richer than pop rock. There's also some really great stuff that's come out of the hip-hop world, depending on how far away from pop you're willing to still call something hip-hop, e.g. DJ Spooky:

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Peace+In+Zaire/2UyeL0?src=5

Just as an example, I love the texture of a lot of stuff from The Roots:

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Don+t+Feel+Right/2LzmSC?src=5

(Note: Several members of The Roots are competent jazz musicians.)

Even Miles Davis's most known albums, Kind of Blue and E.S.P. represented a step towards more simplisitic harmony – "modal jazz" – far simpler than the hard-bop which was at the time prevalent and which Miles had previously played.

The assertation that harmonic complexity precluded the death of art music also seems off-base. Art music was always high-falutin' stuff that mostly rich people, or those wanting to emulate them, listened to. The rise of the relative importance of pop music had more to do with the invention of the phonograph than the increase in harmonic complexity. In fact, many of the first post-romantic composers, Satie, Debussy and Ives, tended towards more simplistic harmonies (arranged in ways that violated the rules of classical and romantic functionalism). It wasn't until the modern period, well after the rise of recorded pop music, that harmonies got particularly wild.

[gruseom]

We just don't listen to them anymore as they haven't stood the test of time. This was abundantly evident last weekend when I went through a stack of about 100 45s from the 60s and early 70s [...] I'd never heard of 90% of the bands

There was a Cambrian explosion of music in that period, and virtually no one ever heard of 90%, probably 99%, of the bands. Countless groups sprang up all over the place and pressed records for their local markets. People have devoted careers to tracking down the recordings of that period; one of them, Greg Shaw (whom I knew for a while) had over a million records. He put out a series of influential compilation albums of his favorites that spawned an entire genre (garage rock). Decades later, this stuff is still being unearthed and released. There are entire series of albums devoted to the 1960s proto-punk of Oregon, or Denmark, or Uruguay. It's just amazing how much there is (enough that I'm skeptical of claims that more was recorded in the 80s), and much of it -- tastes vary, of course -- remains amazingly alive and good. A lot of people would disagree that it hasn't stood the test of time; every generation produces new acts in this lineage (e.g. Black Keys), and the underground history of the music continues to be handed down through the fanbase. Its popularity ebbs and flows in a 10-year cycle or so. Right now it's on an upswing.

Edit (by way of response to the rest of this thread, not to your comment): it's foolish to identify complexity with good music. Punk/new wave was a reaction against complicated, highly produced music which used an awful lot of chords. The entire career of bands like the Stooges and the Ramones was a self-conscious mining of the opposite aesthetic. Consider the famous 2-note guitar solo in the Buzzcocks' "Boredom": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoYiQ8Qsozk&t=1m19s. The rest of the band was rolling on the studio floor laughing while the guitarist played it because nobody believed it was possible to do a guitar solo like that, let alone for that long. It's as far from complicated as you can get but still a great creation. Or think of John Cale's one-note piano drone that runs through the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gsWt7ey6bo#t=23. Cale came from La Monte Young and the Fluxus movement -- highly self-aware avant garde early 60s stuff that he put into a deliberately primitive incarnation. Not saying everyone should like it, but it's as influential and artistic as anything of the last 40 years.

The only rule is that you can't predict what form great art will take. The minute somebody thinks they've figured it out (number of chords? please), the muses jump and bless the opposite.

[twelvechairs]

> There was a Cambrian explosion of music in that period

This is a bit of a simplistic explanation. Underlying this its really just that recording, playing and distributing music at reasonable quality became much cheaper and easier, so we rapidly went from a world where music was incredibly localised and diverse but not an attractive career (because nobody made much money) to one where music was heavily internationalised and less diverse, but more attractive as a career (if you could 'make it').

Sorry if you think thats a nitpick, but I really don't see any evidence that the music of the 1960s was an 'explosion' (in diversity? i assume is what you mean) from what had gone before, just more recorded (probably some good stuff, but also a lot of trash - because suddely you could dream of making money from it).

[gruseom]

Come to think of it, "Cambrian" isn't the best qualifer since there wasn't an explosion of species (genres), but of records in a few popular genres. Let's just say "explosion".

This didn't happen just because music was "cheaper and easier". It happened because of the youth culture of the 60s and the asteroidal impact of rock and roll (better science metaphor?), especially the British Invasion of 1963-64. Kids started bands because it was cool. Most weren't expecting to make money or become stars. They were in it to imitate their heroes and impress girls. This history is well known to fans and students of the period, and it's documented. Fanatical pop archivists have traveled to places like Kansas City and tracked down members of bands who pressed 300 copies of some 45 they recorded in 1966 and interviewed them about it.

By 1969, there was a sharp dropoff, not because the economics changed (it's not as if electric guitars got more expensive) but because the cultural moment had passed. Rock and roll became "rock" and started taking itself seriously. Bands started putting out slicker stuff that, in retrospect, was far less fresh and exciting. Fans of rock and roll talk about those years as the dark ages. The DIY aesthetic kicks back in bigtime with punk, which was a conscious effort to revive the values of the mid-60s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHPQI4b0ybE#t=18).

As I said, this stuff is all well documented. I learned about it from old fanzines and liner notes, so I don't have websites handy, but it ought to be pretty easy to find out about.

[gamache]

"Consider the famous 2-note guitar solo in the Buzzcocks' "Boredom": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoYiQ8Qsozk&t=1m15s. The rest of the band was rolling on the studio floor laughing while the guitarist played it because nobody believed it was possible to do a guitar solo that insane, let alone stick with it for that long. It's as far from complicated as you can get but still a great creation."

If he hadn't spent twenty seconds hammering out E-B-E-B, the ending Bb wouldn't be special at all!

[anigbrowl]

that song (dunno who it's by) with the lyrics "We found love in a hopeless place"

It's by Rihanna, and I can't even understand how it got released. It's like something that got rejected from how-to-make-techno.tumblr.com for being too basic.

[sliverstorm]

It's got a strong hook- something I have come to believe is nine-tenths of a pop single's success.

[davec]

don't forget a lot of money and promotion. I think that's at least half

[aswanson]

Its incredibly repetitive pop drivel. I wonder if teens have a higher tolerance for repetition than adults. They seem the only demographic with any affinity for this type of stuff.

[krakensden]

When you're young, you've heard less music. Which means that things that seem derivative and samey to older people don't to teens.

There is also, in general, more tolerance for repetition in dance music than in other genres.

[gizzlon]

My impression is that older people stop listening to new music, so at some point that's not true anymore..

[anigbrowl]

I listen to a lot of trance/techno music and other similarly repetitive genres (eg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrAxmOvjSYw&feature=relat...). But I like it to have a few different elements to cycle between, and when there's a big musical build I expect it to climax with something other than the exact same thing that came immediately before the build. I have literally made more interesting things than this over morning coffee, and I don't consider myself any great shakes as a musician.

The only explanation I can come up with for the release of this tune is that the quite-talented Rihanna was either incapable or unwilling to go back to the studio to record anything and there was a looming contract deadline imposed by her record publishers, so her management team took some abandoned recording material from a previous session and farmed it out to a momentarily-popular DJ.

[netrus]

Calvin Harris (producer of the song) is hands down the worst DJ I have ever seen in action. No feeling for the audience and horrible noise.

[planetguy]

That's surprising, given that the only other Rihanna song I know ("Umbrella") is... well, it's a bit annoying, but it's got significantly more going on musically.

[sliverstorm]

I think there is one thing you are overlooking: IMO, the reason the 1980s had simple music wasn't anything complicated; it was the electric guitar. Power chords are super easy to use, and with an electric guitar they still sound good.

[anigbrowl]

The electric guitar wasn't a enw things in the 1980s. I suspect the return to simplicity was a combination of two things; punk rock musicians' antipathy to the complex arrangements and elaborate production of disco, and the availability of (relatively) cheap and reliable digital synthesizers, which led to a proliferation of electronic 'one man bands.' It's easy to make all the music in a track yourself with a few electronic instruments, but if your primary skill is in the production of said music, then the rhythm, melodies, and harmony are going to be more basic.

[byproxy]

I'd consider power-chords as bolstered single notes rather than actual chords. I'm not sure why people are repeating that 80s music was simple. It was a time when synthesizers were becoming more attainable and there was a lot of experimenting on that front. I feel we're going through a similar technical period with computers handling various functions on stage, now.

[cnanders]

Hi planetguy, that is an excellent suggestion, and something we've actually already started working on. One of the things about the database our community is building is that it can be used for so many interesting studies. BTW, the Rihanna song you mentioned came on the other day and I heard someone sing "we found Dove in a soapless place". Couldn't help but laugh.

[tsumnia]

Is this your analysis? I'm far from a novice in Music Theory (only knowledgeable it exists), but thing I'd love to see next would be generating a song through a Markov Chain, or even by applying a genetic algorithm and having viewers vote on their favorite renditions.

I've always wanted to take the lyrics of popular songs and run them through a Markov Chain, just to see what could get produced. Ultimate goal would be to generate a song, the lyrics and then have users upload videos of themselves singing it out.

[cnanders]

Yeah, I'm on the Hooktheory team that wrote the article. I love your idea! We're 100% set up to do that kind of thing. It would certainly make an interesting, fun, social set of posts. Today was our first exposure to the world and the feedback / ideas have been amazing. Thanks for the idea. - Chris

[lusr]

I also came here to suggest a Markov chain generator using your data. I know nothing about music but it seems your analysis also needs to include information about timing (A is followed by B within X ms, C within Y ms, etc.) and some sort of clustering information that would allow choruses to be produced (e.g. identify clusters + cluster timing then information about the chords within the clusters).

Even better would be if you guys released your data and allowed other people to come up with creative ways of analyzing and using it ;) I actually have an idea that I think could work quite well and I'd love to build it but lack the data.

[lt]

This has been crowdsourced once.

Scott Adams, from Dilbert, once postulated that most hit lyrics are nonsense, and asked his readers to post random phrases to create a song:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/01/writ...

A German band picked it up and selected the best random phrases and recorded it:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/01/the-...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=TiH9db...

It's not bad actually.

[RobAtticus]

To expand a bit on the 1980s, certainly the average song might have gotten simpler, but there were still some challenging music being written. Most metal and hard rock might have had simpler harmonic structures, but the complexity was going up as solos became more and more challenging (something that continues into the modern day).

I might argue that the regression towards simpler music starting in the 1980s might be due to MTV and increased media coverage of music stars. Starting with MTV and music videos, to be really successful, your looks started to matter. This gave rise to acts who may not have been as musically talented, but were more marketable because they looked better on TV. That's not to say that music acts were never on TV before 1980, which is obviously not true, but MTV did change the game quite a bit and maybe started this trend of towards simpler music with prettier stars.

[jimmyjazz14]

I'm pretty sure the punk movement inspired the more simple song structures of the 80's more than anything else did; New Wave was a direct offshoot of punk.

[Darmani]

A simpler explanation is simply the changing market and distribution. It was really only in the last two hundred years that composers could support themselves by selling their music rather than relying on patronage, with Beethoven being the first to do so. Cheap recordings and broadcasting have changed the game entirely. You might not be able to name a single popular singer of the 19th century, but that's not because they didn't exist; the practice goes back to the troubadours of nearly a thousand years ago.

It's not that art music has had a big fall from grace and lost its grip on the public's heart, paving the way for rock and pop. It never had that grip in the first place. The musical descendants of Bach and Beethoven are alive and kicking; just look at John Williams.

[autarch]

Are you comparing John Williams to Bach and Beethoven? Williams is a very skilled film composer who's great at borrowing ideas from better composers and reshaping them for film. But his music is very unoriginal on its own.

[toyg]

His point was that there is still complex music being composed in the "classical" tradition, outside of pop, regardless of its actual merits or popularity.

[planetguy]

Yes and no. It was easy for Bach and Beethoven to be innovative, less had been done back then. The story of classical music from 1800 to 1952, though, is a story of composers forever looking for new ways to innovate. First they did away with all the old rules of structure, and we didn't miss them too much. There's some great music from this period.

Then, they started doing away with all the rules of harmony. The prelude of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde has a dissonant chord which resolves to another dissonant chord, and it totally blew everybody's mind. By 1913 you've got The Rite Of Spring which avoids almost all traditional harmonies, and it's causing riots in Paris but a few years later that kind of thing is old hat. In the 1920s you've got Schoenberg going "Y'know what? Screw tonality. Let's just play all the notes one by one; at this point you've got music which very, very few people out there can actually enjoy. I mean, I have a CD of Schoenberg's violin concerto, and even the blurb on the back of the CD doesn't seem to like it very much.

Then you've got a few decades of increasingly obscure music until my chosen endpoint of 1952, which is the year when Johnny Cage wins a flawless victory in the "look how unmusical I can make my music" championship by publishing 4'33", the piece consisting entirely of silence. This was the signal that the old musical tradition had finally disappeared up its own butthole. (1952 is also the year when Rock Around The Clock was first written.)

Anyway, John Williams is basically an acknowledgement that if you're going to make big orchestral music which people actually like, then all the good ideas were taken by 150 years ago, and any additional innovation away from that point pretty much just makes it worse [or, at least, less enjoyable by the majority of people].

[Darmani]

Oh, it's definitely true that many composers reacted and "innovated" away from harmony, and that rock was developed around the same time. But there was a great proliferation in styles in the beginning of the 20th century. During that same period, you have guys like Rachmaninoff, Holst, and Orff -- different points in the musical space, and still popular today. And then you have Ralph Vaughan Williams, who went back to the time before harmony by creating new modal music.

Popular music and art music have coexisted for a long time. There are a lot of trends happening at once in music, and you've hardly made a case that Schoenberg and Cage are strongly connected to the rise of rock. I don't see why your reasoning can't be used to argue that the overwhelming complexity of the Romantics destroyed art music and handed control over to Jazz.

(And, no, John Williams is just an acknowledgement that anyone I call a descendant of Beethoven is going to sound a bit like Beethoven. I can think of several names innovating in the big orchestral space, all of which sound quite a bit different, and most of which you've never heard of.)

[zopa]

Agree with your thesis, but John Williams is the wrong guy for your point. He's a popular composer too, in his own way.

You could point to the Neo-Classicists -- although Prokofiev's dead, of course. Or there's Penderecki; perhaps a hard sell, but deserving.

[Darmani]

Definitely. But a major trend in art music relatively recently has been the mix of foreign and other forms with Western styles (and certainly true of the music I'm familiar with). I could hardly call Karl Jenkins or Tan Dun musical descendants of Beethoven. Perhaps I picked a name based on the wrong criteria.

[muraiki]

Honestly, I wouldn't mind hearing more of your discussion about art music and the breakdown of harmony.

[Panoramix]

I second this.

[kafkaesque]

I think you need to clarify some things.

Do you mean 'rock songs' as in Jimmy Preston's Rock the Joint? Or do you mean 'rock songs' as in rhythm and blues/'black music'/music made by black people? If you mean--well, there is no other way of putting this--music that white musicians were playing that was influenced by R&B/gospel/etc., there aren't only simple songs, as can be heard in Preston's music and many other songs that had added arrangements. Even Little Richard.

This makes me think you are referring to only R&B and gospel (which white musicians named 'rock 'n' roll'). If this is the case, this type of music wasn't exactly popular in the way we think of popular music nowadays, not until white musicians 'appropriated' it.

As you can see, there is some incompatibility with what you're saying. 'Popular songs' did not only consist of rock 'n' roll songs, even though rock 'n' roll was considered popular music in the 50s. I mean, Jo Stafford made so-called traditional pop music, and they weren't exactly simple. If you read about late 70s British 'rock', you'd remember that 'rock 'n' roll' was a dirty word associated with the lower classes, drugs, and misfits, which was not necessarily part of popular music. Unless you mean popular music as opposed to 'classical music' (not the 'classical' from the period within 'classical music', mind you).

I don't want to get into a whole Beatles debate, but Beatles took from many styles and genres. So it isn't exactly fair to compare them to typical rock 'n' roll music, which they themselves started playing and were being trained to play initially.

[philwelch]

Well, you'd have to go by the top n most popular songs for a given year, because otherwise you'll see an explosion over time since there were simply more albums recorded in 1980 than 1950, or in 2010 than in 1980. 2010 had a lot of shitty simplistic pop songs, but it probably had more prog-metal releases as well. Actually, if you go by all releases, pop music might have a diminishing impact, since it lacks a thriving independent scene.

Incidentally, the Beatles' influence is overstated--they usually popularized the innovations of others rather than innovating themselves. They were influential by virtue of their popularity, but they weren't as original. Pierro Scaruffi overstates his point perhaps, but has written the quintessential polemic against the myth of the Beatles: http://www.scaruffi.com/vol1/beatles.html

[zopa]

Bring on the art music discussion! 1) What ever-growing sophistication? Everything you can do with chords and harmony was done by Bach. The next 150 years were variations on that theme. 2) That Stravinsky and Bartok, et ali, are still seen as "edgy" says more about orchestras' willingness to educate their audiences than it does about Stravinsky, or Bartok.

And 3), rock and roll didn't kill art music, or rise from its ashes. It's a separate thing all together, with its roots in earlier popular music genres. (jazz, bluegrass, the blues...) Rather there was significant cross-fertilization between rock and the not-quite-dead-yet art music sub-genre of minimalism.