Music today bland, but louder

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BARCELONA, Spain, July 28 (UPI) -- Researchers in Spain analyzed 464,411 songs, including rock, pop, hip hop, heavy metal and other styles, and found music blander, but louder.

Study leader Joan Serra, a researcher at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Research at the National Research Council, said a computer analysis was performed on songs from a public database of more than 1 million songs recorded from 1955 to 2010, produced by Columbia University.

The latest songs have a lower diversity of timbres, tend to be interpreted with the same instruments and follow predictable paths.

"These musical parameters in the songs are like the words of a text and found that there are fewer different words," Serra said in a statement.

Instead of complex chord progressions, the musical notes follow an easy progression, making it easy to predict where the song is going, the study said.

In the 1960s, there was more experimentation with chords, rhythm and instrumentation. However, the songs today are louder. Another trend is the gradual increase of the intrinsic volume recorded, Serra said.

"The simple chord changes, common tools and strong volume are the ingredients of today's music, make these changes on older songs can make them sound new," Serra said.

The findings were published in Scientific Reports.