You’re probably tired of hearing your parents claim that the old songs are the best.
But they might be right: research shows that song melodies have become simpler since the 1950s.
Researchers have found that the complexity of the melodies of the most popular songs in the US has declined over the past 70 years.
The team from Queen Mary University of London, analyzed the most prominent melodies (usually the vocal melody) of songs that reached the top five positions on the US year-end charts each year between 1950 and 2022.
They found that there were two significant decreases in melodic complexity in 1975 and 2000, with a smaller decrease in 1996.
Since the 1950s, music charts have become less melodically complex, researchers from Queen Mary University of London report
The change in melody in 1975 could be attributed to the rise of genres such as new wave, disco and stadium rock, they said.
The changes documented in 1996 and 2000 could represent the rise of hip hop or the introduction of digital audio workstations, which allowed for the repeated playback of audio loops.
When you compare some top melodies from different decades, the evolution of the song is clearly visible.
While the most popular song in 1964 was The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the equivalent in 1980 was Blondie’s “Call Me.”
The dance hit ‘Macarena’ from Los del Rio was the absolute favorite in 1996 and in 2003 the hip-hop hit ‘In Da Club’ by 50 Cent reached the first place.
While Adele’s power ballad “Rolling in the Deep” was the most popular hit of 2011, in 2021, Dua Lipa’s disco song “Levitating” took the top spot.
Analysis, published in the journal Scientific reportsIt also turned out that while the complexity of the rhythms and pitch arrangements decreased over the decades, the number of notes played per second increased.
And it could be that the increase in the use of digital instruments has allowed the complexity of music to be expressed through sound quality rather than melody, they added.
The study suggests that the Beatles offered a melodic complexity in their music that has since been lost. Pictured are the Beatles in January 1963, the year “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was recorded and released. In the US, it topped the charts in February 1964.
“The dominant pattern emerging from these analyses shows decreasing complexity and increasing note density in popular melodies over time, particularly since 2000,” they wrote.
‘In the 1950s, the range of possible timbres for music production was limited to the sounds you could make with the physical instruments and accessories available at the time.
‘Today, anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can create any sound they can imagine, thanks to the accessibility of digital music production software and libraries of millions of samples and loops.’