Pop Music

Flip through Rolling Stone, and you'll read about a lot of "revolutions" in [popular:common] music: Rock'n'roll and punk, disco and new wave. But for Matthias Mauch-an engineer at Queen Mary University of London-the qualitative analysis of musical evolution-the music critic's take-left him wondering: "Is there some way in which we can take this kind of pub conversation, and make it more quantifiable?"So he and his colleagues [analyzed:analysis] fragments from more than 17,000 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, from 1960 to 2010. They [processed:recorded] the audio to extract information about timbral and harmonic qualities-tagging the files for [attributes:aspects] like "orchestra/harmonic" or "calm/quiet/mellow." Then they used those tags-which they compare to a [musical:instrumental] "fossil record"-to tease out trends about musical evolution over time.