Rimsky-Korsakov at work. Now single composers are becoming less common. Tops break into compositions created by whole groups of peopleThe fact that with the passage of time the musical preferences of listeners change, no one is in doubt. Every year, the fashion for music differs from the previous one — the new direction becomes dominant. Accordingly, if there is a demand, then an offer appears. And this means that more and more performers are starting to compose music belonging to the most popular current - this allows you to earn money, a lot of money. It's simple.
The situation is not new, it is repeated from year to year. Something similar was observed, for example, in the 60s (rock), 80s (pop), 90s (hip hop). All this is true for modern times. But as it turned out, now the musicians are beginning to compose very similar music. Sometimes the voice of the artist, the music and the artists themselves are
so similar to each other that it becomes difficult to distinguish them.
But these are personal impressions. Perhaps, in reality, everything is different? Experts set out to check this point. For this, it was decided to use the data of the Music Genome Project. This, by the way, is the engine that drives Pandora. Project team members identify more than 400 attributes of musical compositions, including genre, song style, tempo, instrumental content.
Studying the various attributes of different musical compositions, one can understand how similar they are. As an example, the above is an 80s music analysis chart. Here there is only one parameter by which the melodies were analyzed - the presence of a synthesizer. As you can see, over time, almost all hits of that time have a sound “interference” of synthesizers.
For 1984, there is a peak in the use of these musical instruments - there is not a single song where a synthesizer would not be used. It was they who determined the homogeneity (that is, the homogeneity) of the musical environment of that time. But nevertheless songs of that time sound differently, it’s enough to take the song “Jump” by Van Allen and “I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder.
Using the very attributes of musical compositions, in 2005, student Tristan Jehan published the work “Making music through listening”. This is a framework for generating music files of computers. According to the creator, this simplifies the following way: you give new songs to the computer, and he, in turn, generates works, the style is good similar to the previously heard songs.
The development of Jehan was used to develop an algorithm for the separation of any musical composition into a small set of characteristics, according to which the “digital imprint” of the composition itself is compiled.
Soon after writing the work, the former student already became one of the co-founders of EchoNest. She herself was later used by Spotify for her recommendation system. The user is offered to listen to exactly the music that he likes, for which there is a special selection below.
In EchoNest, by the way, for comparison of musical compositions not 400, but only 8 parameters are used. With their help, participants in the study on the "similarity of music" decided to test the music from the "top 100 music tracks." In theory, compositions with similar characteristics highlighted by EchoNest should be similar.
So it all happened.
For example , the composition of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and the song from Kesha - “We R Who We R” are very similar in terms of the main characteristics. But perhaps other songs are similar? To do this, you can take hits from different years and check them using the EchoNest algorithm.
The graph above shows that the similarity of musical compositions increases over time. The lower the points of the graph descend along the y-axis, the higher the similarity. As it turned out, the compositions that went from 2012 to 2016 are most similar to each other. According to some experts on music, at present, the creation of songs has become almost an automatic process, different from what it was a couple of decades ago.
If earlier the music was composed by 1-2 authors, and it was similar to the flour shown in the films of music by a musician sitting with a pen in his hands at the piano and hastily recording the found notes, now it is a conveyor. Little is what distinguishes the music industry from the factory - the same specialization, where in the "shop" a few people are engaged in the creation of individual parts, and then everything gets together. Someone makes a bass track, someone - an additional arrangement, someone else collects all the "Circuits". All this can actually be called a “hit factory”, the truth here is more than it seems.
In the 80s, two people worked on most hits. And only 7 famous songs of that time composed more than three people. Now, about 50% of musical compositions are prepared by 4 or more specialists. Songs, where the "developers" of about 10 are not uncommon. The same Havana was going to a team of 11 people. As a result, the songs are not as unique as before, similar compositions are just mass.
Audio and video editors, the ability to transfer individual elements of a composition over the network
led to the fact that now 100 songs can be created in less time than before it took 2-3 songs to write - if they were used by a group of people in the same room. It is known that from 2010 to 2014 the top 10 producers were behind 40% of the songs from the top 5 Billboard Hot 100 melodies. In the 80s, this figure was two times lower.
Enlarge imageIn other words, more and more songs create fewer and fewer people. Naturally, this affects the uniqueness of each melody - it is very difficult for one and the same person to give each time something unique, not like everything that appeared before. Well, the trends are also set by the same people.