Pop music is simple. That’s the idea, anyway. Since the advent of recorded music, the most widely heard music in the world tends to be sharp, catchy and direct. Typically, pop songs are three-minute bursts of heartbreak or excitement or bravado, and they’re ferociously obvious enough to get stuck in your head for hours at a time. But according to a recent scientific study, pop music is actually growing more melodically simple over time.
In a study published in July, researchers from London’s Queen Mary University algorithmically studied the melodies of decades’ worth of US Billboard chart hits, and came to the conclusion that the melodies driving those songs have grown less complex over the years. The researchers stress that this isn’t a qualitative judgment, and they’ve taken pains in the discussion to compensate for the popularity of rap music, a genre where melody can often be incidental. Still, the existence of this kind of study can serve to bolster certain bar-room conversations. If you’re convinced, for instance, that the music of your own youth is superior to whatever’s being made these days, then you can now cite a scientific paper to claim that today’s hits are just dumbed-down slop.
I’m not so sure. For the past six years, I’ve been engaged in a ridiculous exercise – writing a column for the website Stereogum in which I review every No 1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 – the same US pop chart that the Queen Mary University researchers used to build their database. The Hot 100 has continually existed since 1958, and nearly 1,200 songs have reached the top of that chart. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand of them. And while I’m not a scientist, I don’t see a whole lot of anecdotal evidence that pop hits are becoming any simpler, melodically or otherwise.
By transcribing each song’s notes into a simplified computer Midi file, the researchers boiled them down to nothing but melody, taking lyrics and production techniques and societal context out of the equation, and they’ve found that pop hits have grown mathematically less complex, with inflection points arriving in 1975, the moment that disco first stormed the charts, and in 1996 and 2000, crucial years for the growing pop dominance of hip-hop. If those trends keep up, our descendants will presumably get down to monotonal dirges.