Evolution of the Informational Complexity of Contemporary Western Music
This addresses the evolution of musical complexity for musicologists and data analysts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The study measured the complexity of songs from 1960 to 2010 using the Million Song Dataset, finding that popular songs have a narrower complexity distribution and showing trends like decreased loudness complexity and increased timbre complexity over time, with no overall increase in similarity in pitch or rhythm.
We measure the complexity of songs in the Million Song Dataset (MSD) in terms of pitch, timbre, loudness, and rhythm to investigate their evolution from 1960 to 2010. By comparing the Billboard Hot 100 with random samples, we find that the complexity of popular songs tends to be more narrowly distributed around the mean, supporting the idea of an inverted U-shaped relationship between complexity and hedonistic value. We then examine the temporal evolution of complexity, reporting consistent changes across decades, such as a decrease in average loudness complexity since the 1960s, and an increase in timbre complexity overall but not for popular songs. We also show, in contrast to claims that popular songs sound more alike over time, that they are not more similar than they were 50 years ago in terms of pitch or rhythm, although similarity in timbre shows distinctive patterns across eras and similarity in loudness has been increasing. Finally, we show that musical genres can be differentiated by their distinctive complexity profiles.