Open Access“The Times They Were A-Changin’”: A Database-Driven Approach to the Evolution of Musical Syntax in Popular Music from the 1960s
Author(s) -
Hubert Léveillé Gauvin
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
empirical musicology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1559-5749
DOI - 10.18061/emr.v10i3.4467
Subject(s) - harmony (music) , musical , tonic (physiology) , popular music , linguistics , syntax , speech recognition , history , computer science , art , literature , psychology , philosophy , neuroscience
The goal of this research is to investigate the pitch structures of popular music in the 1960s through a large corpus study in order to identify any consistent changes in harmonic and tonal syntax. More specifically, two studies based on the Billboard DataSet (Burgoyne, Wild & Fujinaga, 2011; Burgoyne, 2011), a new corpus presenting transcriptions for more than 700 songs, is presented. The first study looks at the incidence of multi-tonic songs throughout the decade, while the second study focuses on the incidence of flat-side harmonies (e.g. bIII, bVI, and bVII) over the same period of time. While no difference was observed in the frequency of multi-tonic songs, the study showed a significant increase in the incidence of flat-side harmonies during the second half of the decade.