Please log in or sign up to comment.
Scientists discover exactly what it takes to make a hit record
Hit songs are getting louder and rhythmically more repetitive, according to a scientific study of chart music, which concludes that pop's golden era was actually the often-maligned 1980s.
A research team from the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory in the Faculty of Engineering set out to predict the popularity of a song by using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.
The team examined the UK Top 40 Singles Chart over the past 50 years and sought to identify the distinguishing features of songs which made the top five, compared to those which stumbled outside the top 30.
Click here for graphic: 'Top of the Pops: Why the 80s were the best'
The researchers used musical features such as tempo, time signature, song duration and loudness. They also computed detailed summaries of the songs such as harmonic simplicity, how simple the chord sequence is, and "non-harmonicity" ??" how "noisy" a song is.
By weighting the most significant 23 audio features, the team, led by Dr Tijl de Bie, produced a catchy equation for a potential hit: (w1 x f1) + (w2 X f2) + ... + (w23 X f23). How good is this equation? They claim it can predict with an accuracy of 60 per cent if a song will make it to the top 5, or if it will never reach above position 30 on the UK Top 40 Singles Chart.
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/your-parents-are-right-modern-music-is-getting-louder-and-more-repetitive-6278364.html
http://scoreahit.com/