THE Stones or the Beatles? That, as any baby-boomer knows, is the most important question in music. But for American boomers it raises a second question. Were those two bands really responsible for the revolution of 1963 and 1964, which those west of the Atlantic call the British Invasion, and those to its east just think of as the beginning of modern popular music?
Matthias Mauch of Queen Mary, a part of the University of London, and Armand Leroi of Imperial College London, decided to attack this second question and other, similar ones, in a scientific manner. As they report this week in Royal Society Open Science, they took their data from the Billboard Hot 100, the standard music-industry chart for singles in America. They used Last.fm, a music-streaming service, to collect 30-second clips from 17,094 songs (86% of the total) that were in this chart between 1960 and 2010. Then they attacked each clip with sonic analysis and statistics.
They found that they could extract what they describe as “topics” from the music. These were coherent harmonic and timbral themes which were either present in or absent from a clip. Harmonic...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1IerNTQ
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