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1 .This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata. Got a minute?
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2 .Flip through Rolling Stone, and you'll read about a lot of "revolutions" in popular music: Rock'n'roll and punk, disco and new wave.
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3 .But for Matthias Mauch, an engineer at Queen Mary University of London, the qualitative analysis of musical evolution, the music critic's take, left him wondering:
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4 ."You know is there some way in which we could take this sort of pub conversation, and make it more quantifiable?"
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5 .So he and his colleagues analyzed fragments from more than 17,000 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, from 1960 to 2010.
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6 .They processed the audio to extract information about timbral and harmonic qualities, tagging the files for attributes like "orchestra/harmonic" or "calm/quiet/mellow."
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7 .Then they used those tags, which they compare to a musical "fossil record"—to tease out trends about musical evolution over time.
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8 .Turns out, from 1960 to 2009, the dominant seventh chord
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9 .all but disappeared - in what they call the death of blues and jazz on the pop charts.
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10 .But as dominant sevenths faded, the minor seventh came into its own…
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11 .more than doubling in frequency between 1967 and 77.
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12 ."we can really see the influx of funk, which is really turning into disco."
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13 .But next - as you know - come the 80s.
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14 .Dominated by a rise in musical tags like "percussive" and "guitar/aggressive", the 80s were a low point for musical diversity.
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15 .In fact 1986 stands out as the year that chart-topping songs sounded most alike.
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16 ."Then obviously the charts got saved in terms of diversity, by this new kid on the block, the rap and hip hop coming in.
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17 .And then suddenly, boom - the diversity's back up and actually higher than before."
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18 .The study appears in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
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19 .Of course, this big-data approach to pop culture probably won't overturn years of music scholarship.
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20 .But the analysis does show that in the evolution of popular music,
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21 .there really have been long periods of stasis, punctuated by periods of rapid change - musical revolutions - particularly in 1964, 1983, and 1991.
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22 .And the more you study it, Matthias says, the more musical evolution starts to resemble plain old species evolution.
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23 ."You take something that exists.
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24 .And that in biology would be genes. But it's not genes here. You just take some styles.
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25 .And you recombine them, like genes are recombined, and you change them as well - a bit like mutation."
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26 .Who knows - maybe that might have been a better argument against copyright infringement for Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.
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27 .
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28 .'It's just evolution, your honor.'
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29 .Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
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