You’re right: Music isn’t what it used to be. This is according to science.
Have you ever said to yourself “Today’s music sucks. It was so much better back in the day.” Turns out you may be right–and now you have science to back things up.
According to a study at Rome’s Sapienza University, modern music is rubbish compared to the way things used to be because it’s been dumbed down so much.
A group of academics looked at 20,000 MIDI files culled from six different genres from the last 400(!!!) years of music composition. They were able to “represent each composition as a weighted directed network to study its structural properties” and then used AI to determine how each of these music files related to each other. In other words, they compared how complex music used to be vs. what it’s like today.
Here’s what they found out.
- Classical music remains the most complex of the genres studied. (Well, duh.)
- Rock, pop, hip-hop, jazz, electronic, and even contemporary classical have become less complex in their construction.
I have no idea what these charts really show, but the direction of the graphs can’t be good.
Why is music becoming simpler? More people are making music, diluting the level of compositional talent. And because we have so much music-making technology at our disposal, we don’t need to learn the finer points of music theory or spend 10,000 practicing an instrument.
Read more at MusicRadar.
