Why Do I Like This Song? And Other Important Questions GREG STIFFLER COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF BALTIMORE COUNTY [email protected] Can’t Get it Outta’ My Head

 What songs will you always remember?

 What songs give you chills or excite you?

 Selection 1:

 Selection 2:

 Selection 3:

 Selection 4:

 Selection 5:

 Selection 6: Born This Way

 From an early age, form opinions on music and sound

 From as early as age 5, we can decipher changes in tempo, happy/sad excerpts by extension (study 9)

 Major chords typically envoke happiness, elation

 Minor chords typically envoke sadness, stoicism or sad feelings (study 9)

 Emotional associations established early in development (study 14)

 Have you ever anticipated a refrain or hook in a song?

 This comes from one place… Check My Brain

 Important parts of the brain

 Ventral striatum

 Nucleus accumbens (NAc)

 Ventral tegmental area (VTA)

 Hippocampus

 Amygdala

 Insular cortex (insula)

 Periaqueductal gray (PAG)/pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus (PPT)  Pleasure center of the brain (study 13 and websites)

 Addiction center If I Only Had a Brain…

 But I don’t even like that song!  Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

 Doesn’t matter  Food, sex increase dopamine activity in NAc (study 13)  Only familiarity needed to stimulate amygdala, NAc (study8)  Midbrain and reward center responses to music mimic those of cocaine  Mere Exposure Effect studies; NAc, VTA, and insula area  “…mere repetition of melodies is sufficient in increase affective  Research suggest stimulation of PAG responses to these melodies.” and PPT areas, known for opioid receptors  Liked or unliked, familiarity activated parts of the brain associated with  Even anticipation can lead to dopamine emotion release in the prefrontal cortex area, creating a type of auditory craving (study 7) How can we exploit, hack, utilize these patterns? We Got the Beat

 “Magic” beat tempo?

 Multiple studies show that ‘preferred’ bpm for most people is around 120

 Moelants (2002): 120-125

 Fraisse (1982): 100

 Parncutt (1994): 100

 Levy (2011): 115-120

 Sykes finds African American popular music moderate tempo 93-138 bpm

 Zeiner-Henriksen finds club (EDM) 120-135 (all study 3) What Does the Math Say?

 2011 study at University of Minas

 Data mined from Billboard top 100 and 200, and Million Song Database

 From 1940-2010, average tempo 117-122 bpm, fluctuation of 5 bpm (study 12)

 2010 Rutgers analysis

 Looking at 50 years of American pop songs (approx. 4200), average bpm 119.8 (study 11)

 Some songs around 120 bpm Note to Self

 Chords help frame the song, provide theme or direction, create harmony

 Major chords envoke happy or brighter feelings

 D Major –

 C Major -

 Minor chords envoke somber or sad feelings (Kate and Dave)

 Minor –

 Various chords and keys are popular in music (Hooktheory.com) Three (or Four) Chord Pony

 Some chord progressions are more popular due to harmony

 Sutcliffe found I – IV - V progression to be popular in modern music (study 6)

 4 Chord progression

 I – V – iv - IV via ultimate-guitar.com  Often C – G – am – F in key of C (hooktheory.com)

 Often chosen because they harmonize so well

via piano-keyboard-guide.com Sounds of Silence (they sound familiar)

 With such a popular setup, patterns will  If it works… emerge

 Chord progressions cannot be copyrighted, melodies sometimes (dave, askaudio.com)

 Katy Perry/Ke$ha

 Katy Perry 2010

 Ke$ha 2010

 Mashup (DJPlaceboing) Straight Outta’ Sweden

 Popular music today either has origins from American R&B, or Europop  Max Martin and Lukasz Gottwald (Dr Luke)  More that 30 top 10 hits between them since 2004  Swedish writers supplied ¼ of all hits from Billboard top 100 in 2014  Swedish pop influence came from ABBA  “Superficially happy” sounding  Ear candy: harmonies, countermelodies, synthetic sounds  Influenced Martin to combine beat-driven music (clubs) with pop  All about the chorus  Melodies match beat, not meant to be complex  Beat above all  “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way….as long as it isn’t boring” Ain’t Nuthin but a Swede Thang

 Found success with “The Sign”, then wrote for Backstreet Boys  Studio Cheiron  Meld four bars of a dance beat (kick drum, hand clap, and snare) made so close they sound like one sound, pleases ears  Gave Britney “Hit Me Baby”, originally for TLC  Made Kelly Clarkson  Influenced Stargate who wrote for Rihanna  Industrialized “Track and Hook” method, vs melody and lyrics  Factory style  1) make tracks 2) get suggestions for melody/lyrics 3) pick best 4) profit  Like “writing a TV show”  Get hook FAST, then Vamp, progresses in 3-4 chord patterns with little variation All I Do is Win

 Producer-driven creation breeds familiarity

 Looking for Patterns

 Producer most (or very) important

 Owns topliner (writes song over premade beat)

 Gets big piece of publishing

 Runs session (and pays for it)

 Ryan Tedder

 Produced for Beyonce’ and Kelly Clarkson

 Similar songs

 Already Gone

 Halo

 Same? For the Love of Money

 Money drives all

 90% of the revenue in music business comes from 10% of the songs

 13 million song available for purchase in 2008

 52,000 made up 80 % of revenue

 10 million didn’t sell one track (all seabrook)

 During 1998 2% of albums sold more than 500,000; 10% of all titles broke even

 Requires a new look at selling songs

 Create stars, get teams to write surefire hits What Does This Give Us?

 Songs are louder, more condensed  Auditory “junk food” (seabrook)  Analysis of 500,000 songs in UK

 Less ‘happy’, and male singers

 Successful songs ‘happier’, more ‘danceable’

 Successful songs relatively rare (study5)  2012 study of songs from 1955-2010

 Songs get louder, more compressed

 “simplier pitch sequences”

 Less timbral variety (study 2) Conclusion

 Pop does follow trends

 Based on science and what people react to

 Pop stars often used and dumped, built up

 Less variety among certain genres, but more variety in general for listening

 Your thoughts? Works Cited

 Interiano, M., Kazemi, K., Wang, L., Yang, J., Yu, Z., Komarova, NL. (2018) Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts. Royal Society Open Science, 5  Mauch, M., MacCallum, RM., Levy, M., Leroi, AM. (2015) The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010. Royal Society Open Science, 2  Serra, J., Corral, A., Boguna, M., Haro, M., Arcos, J. (2012) Measuring the evolution of contemporary western popular music. Scientific Reports, 2  Gordon, M. S. (2016). Absolute tempo perception of popular music. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 26(3), 236-246.  Rosetta. (2012, March 26). Recurring Patterns in Popular Music. Retrieved from http://www.teenink.com/nonfiction/academic/article/447858/ Recurring-Patterns-in-Popular-Music/  Madden, B. (2014, June 19). The resonant human: The science of how tempo affects us. Retrieved from https://sonicscoop.com/2014/06/19/the- resonant-human-the-science-of-how-tempo-affects-us/  Bella, S.D., Peretz, I., Rousseau, L., & Gosselin, N. (2001). A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and mode in music. Cognition, 80(3), B1-10. Works Cited

 Pereira, C. S., Teixeira, J., Figueiredo, P., Xavier, J., Castro, S. L., & Brattico, E. (2011). Music and emotions in the brain: familiarity matters. PloS one, 6(11), e27241.  de Clercq, Trevor. (2016). Measuring a Measure: Absolute Time as a Factor for Determining Bar Lengths and Meter in Pop/Rock Music. Music Theory Online. 22(3)  van den Bosch, I., Salimpoor, V. N., & Zatorre, R. J. (2013). Familiarity mediates the relationship between emotional arousal and pleasure during music listening. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 7, 534. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00534  Blood, A., & Zatorre, R. (2001). Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98(20), 11818-11823. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3056798  Engelhardt, T., & Ellis, S. (n.d.). Visualizing a Hit - InfoVis Final Project. Retrieved August 3, 2018, from https://sites.google.com/site/visualizingahit/home Works Cited

 Vieillard, S., Peretz, I., Gosselin, N., Khalfa, S., Gagnon, L., & Bouchard, B. (2008). Happy, sad, scary and peaceful musical excerpts for research on emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 22(4), 720-752.

 www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/pinky-and-the-brain-dominate

 www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/scumbag-brain

 Carlton, D., (2012). I analyzed the chords of 1300 songs for patterns. This is what I found. Retrieved November 11, 2018 from http://www.hooktheory.com/blog