Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on the study revealing pop song melodies have gotten simpler over the last few decades

'They don’t make music like they used to'- you might say as you listen to the latest hits on the radio. Well, new research published in the journal Scientific Reports might prove you right.

In the study, researchers analysed 1,131 melodies from 360 singles that reached the top 5 US Billboard charts each year between 1950 and 2022.

They chose to study melodies because when asked to sing a popular song, most people would sing the melody rather than its bassline or drum pattern.

They found that the complexity of song rhythms and pitch arrangements continued to decline over the decades.

The big changes, which the researchers call ‘melodic revolutions’ were in 1975, 1996 and 2000.

In 1952, You Belong With Me was released by Jo Stafford and it contained a complex, rhythmic melody. While there is a beat in the background, Jo doesn’t sing on beat and instead flows over the music with her voice.

Moving to 1975, Love Will Keep Us Together was released by Captain & Tennille. Here, the singing is kept on beat and it’s a much simpler song rhythmically.

Then in 2009, we had Poker Face by Lady Gaga, where the same note is sung over and over again with a very simple melody.

While the researchers found that melodic complexity decreased over time, they also found that the average number of notes played per second increased, mostly due to technological advances.

In the 1950s, music production was limited to whatever physical instruments could be used in the song. However, today's digital music production software can create almost any sound imaginable.

So while melodies are getting simpler, chords are getting more complex - meaning the overall complexity of modern songs are the same as the golden oldies, it’s just the balance of melodies over production that has changed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talk SEDB and then our.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Girl, doctor Michelle Dickinson is here with our science study
of the week, and we're gonna sit here and talk
about the old times, like old ladies. Are we so good?

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Because I don't know if you said this before, but
I just go, oh, man, they don't make music like
they used to. Whenever you know, you say to somebody, hey,
what's your absolute favorite song? Yeah, I never hear somebody
name something some last week. It's like, I mean, for me,
it would be Frank Sinatra, that sort of era. What
about you?

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Oh, I can I can pick favorites from every era
that I can remember, music from my whole life. I
can remember the first album I got was the Teddy
Bears Picnic. The second one was Fame. Like, you know,
music's just the soundtrack to my life.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Really, But would you pick something that was released this month?

Speaker 2 (00:57):
No? Probably not no, because we're old. I do this
all the time, making compilations on Spotify from every decade
and every genre.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
And so the question is, and this is in the
Journal Scientific Reports and its own source, so you can
go and read it if you like. The question is
do they make music like they used to? Are we
all nostalgic for something that you know isn't true? Or
is music better golden oldie's music? Is it better than
it is today? So they took three hundred and sixty
singles that had reached the US Billboard Top five between

(01:28):
the years nineteen fifty and twenty twenty two, and they
decided they weren't going to study the whole song. And
they said, well, we could, you know, study the bassline
or the drum pattern, but they decided to study the
melody for each and they said, the melody is what
resonates with people. If I said to you sing your
favorite song, you would probably sing the melody is the
bit that you remember the most. I said, okay, we're
going to mathematically analyze all of the melodies from these

(01:51):
stringe and sixty songs, and we're going to see if
the olden songs are actually better than your ones. And
what they found is, I guess intuitive, but it sort
of makes sense. As we have come closer in time
to now the complexity of song melodies has decreased, Songs
are getting simpler, and we sort of knew that, and

(02:11):
they took some great examples. So they started in nineteen
fifty two with a song by Joe Stafford that you
might know called You Belong with Me. It's a beautiful
song and her voice in it is incredible. And what's
interesting in that song is there is a background beat,
but she ignores it totally. She just sings over the beat.
Sometimes she's in tune, sometimes it doesn't matter because her

(02:33):
melody is so amazing and the words are so moving
that you don't care that there's a beat behind her.
Then we move to nineteen seventy five, you may know,
Captain and Tamil did a song called Love Will Keep
Us Together, great song you probably won't know how to
sing along. And again this was now on beat and
a really easy melody that you can all sing along with.

(02:53):
And then they took us to two thousand and nine
Lady Gaga's Poke Face, which, if you know, it's basically
the same no godge yeah continuously and that's it. It's
just the same note with the words, and then it's
a very simple melody. And so mathematically they've gone, this
is what's happened to music. We used to have beautiful
oldies with lots of different like pictures, and now it's

(03:18):
sort of really simple, and they've gone, well, why is that?
And they've gone through these melodic revolutions that they've identified mathematically.
One was in nineteen seventy five, which is when the
Beetle sort of came around and sort of that rock
sort of pop music started coming in. The next one
was nineteen ninety six, which is where sort of hip
hop and the Spice Girls started changing the era, and

(03:39):
that sort of continued through to the two thousand. So
we've definitely had these revolutions. The authors actually go and
it's thanks to technology. So what happened in the nineteen
fifties is music producers only had physical instruments to mix,
so everything was simple and the thing you can make
more complicated was the melody. But then as soon as
we got digitization, you could start to create pretty much

(04:01):
any sound you've ever wanted to create in your life.
So they made the background more complex. Ladies got simpler.
So you are right, the oldies are the best.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
The oldies are the best, and the great thing is
we can still listen to them.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
It's still there. But music is the same complexity it's
just the melodies are now.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Simpler, fascinating. Thank you so much, Michelle.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio