Trajectories and Revolutions in Western Popular Melody (Madeline Hamilton, Queen Mary University of London)

In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify “melodic revolutions”, changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. The revolutions divided the time series into eras, which were modeled separately with autoregression, linear regression and vector autoregression. In this talk, we will discuss this analysis and what it means for the state of Western popular music.

Biography

Madeline Hamilton is a PhD candidate working in the Music Cognition Lab at Queen Mary University of London, under supervisor Dr. Marcus Pearce. Her work in computational musicology has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Independent. She also conducts research in the empirical aesthetics of music.