Music is a collection of coordinated sound or sounds. Making music is the process of putting sounds and tones in an order, often combining them to create a unified composition. People who make music creatively organize sounds for a desired result, like a Beethoven symphony or one of Duke Ellington’s jazz songs. Music is made of sounds, vibrations and silent moments, and it doesn’t always have to be pleasant or pretty. It can be used to convey a whole range of experiences, environments and emotions.
Almost every human culture has a tradition of making music. Examples of early instruments like flutes and drums have been found dating back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians used music in religious ceremonies. Many other African cultures have traditions related to drumming for important rituals. Today, rock and pop musicians tour and perform around the word, singing the songs that made them famous. All of these are examples of music.
The video recounts some work conducted in 2012 by the Spanish National Research Council, which analyzed 500,000 recordings from 1955 to 2010. They dred three statistics for each song: harmonic complexity, timbral diversity, and loudness.
Over that period, the timbre (“the texture, quality, and color of the sounds within the music” or “richness and depth of sound”) has dropped steadily after peaking in the 1960s. Music has become more homogeneous among songs, with a progression called “The Millennial Whoop”.
Another study looked at what it called the “lyric intelligence” of Billboard chart-toppings songs: the difficulty of lyrics and quality of the writing; and that, too, has dropped over the past decade. Lyrics are getting shorter and more repetitive. Further, a huge swath of chart-topping music in recent years was written by just two men: the Swede Max Martin and the American Lukasz Gottwald, or “Dr. Luke.” This was new to me, but explains the monotony and homogeneity of so many recent songs.
Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music. Scientific Reports.
word use in popular song lyrics—changes over time in harmony with cultural changes in individualistic traits. Linguistic analyses of the most popular songs from 1980–2007 demonstrated changes in word use that mirror psychological change. Over time, use of words related to self-focus and antisocial behavior increased, whereas words related to other-focus, social interactions, and positive emotion decreased.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(3), 200-207.
Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics.
Music of the day: What classical music have we been listening to in class?
tempo, rhythm, meter, pitch, melody, texture, dynamics, harmony, and form.
intervals, chords, and harmonic progressions in an analysis of music.