Evolutionary Analysis of Billboard's top 100

[1nfinitezer0]

I've wanted to apply evolutionary analysis to electronic music for a long time, as a way of filling the gap since Ishkur's guide became horribly out of date.

This paper is focused more on analyzing the trends in pop music from looking at trends in audio characterization from Billboard's top 100 over the years. It's as long and dense as your average scientific paper, but worth a skim nonetheless (or just the figures).

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05417v1.pdf

[Mattias]

Thanks, looks like a nice read all of it. Just got through the first half, saving the rest for coffee.

[Wiu]

[Hades]

yeah man,

and people tell me I write way too long posts.

seriously, that kind of research stuff is totally wasted on me I'm afraid.

no offence to OP

but what exactly did you mean to find as an outcome of this lengthy process ?

[Hepta]

and people tell me I write way too long posts.

[1nfinitezer0]

Not my research. I just posted it for interests sake. Doesn't really have a consequence on how to make music, but maybe some ideas coming from the tools of how people analyze music. The most interesting points were that:
1) Rap is seen as such a big change in the landscape of modern music
2) The pre-emptive stylistic preferences preceding the 'British Invasion' suggests that popular music seeds itself through micro-trends before breaking into the big sphere.
It's been really interesting with the internet from 2009 on or so, as the free music radio stations, youtube and blogs have changed how musical trends are evolving. I've enjoyed keeping up on the breaking trends of hot new subgenres in electronic music. Sometimes my prediction of things that will get big are right (uk funky) other times out to lunch (juke/footwerk), but it's fascinating to see the landscape evolve at such a high pace.

Aside: long posts = speed readers. spreeder.com or readsy.co are my goto

[Hades]

Not my research. I just posted it for interests sake. Doesn't really have a consequence on how to make music, but maybe some ideas coming from the tools of how people analyze music. The most interesting points were that:
1) Rap is seen as such a big change in the landscape of modern music
2) The pre-emptive stylistic preferences preceding the 'British Invasion' suggests that popular music seeds itself through micro-trends before breaking into the big sphere.
It's been really interesting with the internet from 2009 on or so, as the free music radio stations, youtube and blogs have changed how musical trends are evolving. I've enjoyed keeping up on the breaking trends of hot new subgenres in electronic music. Sometimes my prediction of things that will get big are right (uk funky) other times out to lunch (juke/footwerk), but it's fascinating to see the landscape evolve at such a high pace.

Aside: long posts = speed readers. spreeder.com or readsy.co are my goto

well thx for the summary,
don't get me wrong it's not soo much the length that turns me off, but the style and statistical stuff.
(It reads like a university paper (which it probably is), and I never liked that kind of "style", so to say.)

I read lots of books.
I'm currently building a new library so the old room used as our library now can move downstairs to a bigger place (books from floor to ceiling and the ceiling is at approx 3.60m high),
so I can use the old library room to hold my vinyl and CD's and put up a DJ setup.

anyway, my wife reads like twice as much as me normally, or at least used to, but she reads about 3x as fast.
we always have discussions that she'll miss out on a lot of details if she reads that fast.
she always says she doesn't, but I have proven her wrong on many occasions.
At one time, I was halfway a 600 page book, and there was this tiny detail, only one single sentence which gave away the whole plot to any decent reader (who understood the reference in that one sentence, because it referred to a very famous book which had the same plot-twist as this book),
so I go marching in the bedroom, waking up the mrs (who read the book a few months before me), being totally pissed off that the writer put that detail there
(and believe me it was very much on purpose, that detail)
and my mrs of course never noticed that detail.

I agree that speed-reading might help if you have to read a lot for work or studies or whatever,
but fuck me, with fiction, some author once invested a huge amount of time into writing the book you're reading,
why not read it on a normal pace and thoroughly enjoy it ?

would you like it if people would just fast forward through your tracks really quickly to jump to the next track ?
of course I know it happens all the time (I do it myself when browsing through the weekly HardWax newsletter), but when I for example ask someone to listen to a track of mine,
and I'd see them do that, I'd be rather disappointed, cause I couldd never do to them that when I was asked to listen to their music.


anyways, I can type a LOT faster than I can read...

[wouterdewitte]

A nice sunday read, thanks for posting this!