Digital Workshop

Excerpt: Your parents are officially correct. Nowadays, pop music all sounds pretty much the same.

Researchers in Spain came to the conclusion after tracking the timbre, pitch and volume of nearly a half-million songs released between 1955 and 2010. They found that in this music dataset — which spanned rock, pop, hip-hop, metal and electronic genres — the transitions between chords (a string of notes played at the same time), note combinations, tone and instrument choices all became less and less diverse over time. Meanwhile, the songs grew intrinsically louder.