Sad Songs Say So Much?
As measured by key and tempo—and setting lyrics aside—pop music has gotten gloomier since the mid-1960s, two researchers report.They analyzed the top 40 songs from the Billboard year-end "Hot 100" chart for selected years from 1965 to 2009, assessing whether each hit was written in a major or minor key, and taking note of its tempo and duration. Songs in a minor key tend to be associated with sadder emotions, as do slower songs. (When songs mixed major and minor modes, the song was classified according to the longer-lasting mode; when they varied in tempo, the beats-per-minute of different sections were averaged.)Over time, the most striking change had to do with key: In the 1965-69 period, 85% of hits were written in a major key, but that proportion had fallen to 42.5% by 2005-09. Songs also dropped to 100 beats per minute in 2005-09 from 116 beats in 1965-69. The authors found signs that pop music was growing more emotionally ambiguous: Major-key ("happy") songs, for example, slowed down more than minor-key songs.
"Emotional Cues in American Popular Music: Five Decades of the Top 40," E. Glenn Schaellenberg and Christian von Scheve, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (forthcoming)
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