Pop Music Is Too Loud and All Sounds The Same

That looks like a headline from 1957, doesn't it?  Yet it's brand new this week.

The statement refers to the results crunched from something called the Million Song Dataset which has been a project of Spanish researchers deep into artificial intelligence.

By breaking down pop songs released between 1955 and 2010, they've discovered that pop songs have become louder and more bland in terms of construction (chords, melodies and types of sounds used.)

From Reuters:

"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse,"  [researcher Joan] Serra told Reuters. "In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."

They also found the so-called timbre palette has become poorer. The same note played at the same volume on, say, a piano and a guitar is said to have a different timbre, so the researchers found modern pop has a more limited variety of sounds.

So it's not our imagination.  Pop music does sound the same.  Read more here.