Ch-ch-changes: The evolving elements of pop music

Pop music is often considered a reflection of changing culture in the United States — and between 1960 and 2010, songs featured in the Billboard Hot 100 varied greatly. Researchers in England recently analyzed almost all the singles that charted during that period to reveal trends in the evolution of popular music—noting, among other things, that the biggest revolution to occur was the birth of rap in 1991 and that, with the exception of a brief synthesizer-happy period in the 1980s, there’s always been a lot of diversity in American pop.

To construct their evolutionary history of American pop, the scientists looked at quantifiable digital elements in the music that correspond with rhythmic, harmonic, and tonal qualities in the songs, noting where they clustered and how they changed over time.

Below, we highlight some of the easier-to-understand tonal elements they tracked, linking them to particular artists and songs. Several trends in the team’s analysis are also displayed in the graphic below, with each of the approximately 17,000 songs they analyzed represented as a dot. Search by artist and tonal quality. Mouse over chart to see results.