Music is dumbing down – and that’s no bad thing
Is music dumbing down? Yes, comes the answer from thousands of disgruntled music fans of a certain age, who look back fondly to the old days. Taylor Swift isn’t a patch on Blondie. John Adams is nowhere near Stravinsky’s level. Jazz pianist Robert Glasper would be played off the stage by Oscar Peterson. Film composer Hans Zimmer isn’t fit to tie Max Steiner’s or Eric Korngold’s shoelaces. And so and so on.
You could say –‘twas ever thus. One of my childhood memories is of hearing my father growl about 1960s pop bands. “They can only play three chords!” he would complain. But people now look back on the 1960s as a golden era. They lament that pop these days seems to have no memorable tunes, no interesting chord changes.
Earlier this month some research appeared in the journal Scientific Research which showed the lamenters might actually have a point. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Aarhus University in Denmark analysed the scores of 366 pop songs released between 1950 and 2022, using eight different measures of complexity.
Some of these were melodic, like size of interval, how closely the melody cleaves to our expectations, and how well it conforms to tonal rules. Others were rhythmic, including how many notes there were in the melody there were per bar, and – as with melody – the degree of unpredictability in the sequence. That’s a useful measure, because the more unpredictable a rhythm or melody is, the more complex it seems to the listener.
Having converted all the findings into numbers and deployed some sophisticated statistical tools, the researchers came up with fairly conclusive findings. The graphs for most of the measures of complexity plunge down in around 1975 and 2000, with a smaller dip in 1996. The authors suggest this could be due to the rise of genres which put less emphasis on melody, such as disco and hip hop. But they caution that just because the melodies become elementary, it doesn’t mean the song as a whole is bad. It could be that complexity migrates to other parts of the song, such as subtle ‘production values’ or the rapid-fire verbal play in hip hop – and indeed one graph that pertains to that kind of complexity does actually go up.
This seems right. In every art form there seems to be a hidden hand, working to ensure a balance of factors. If formal balance in a painting is the desired feature, there will be a reduction in realistic messiness. In Debussy’s music the play of colour and harmony is the most important factor, so it would be wrong-headed to look for the dynamic symphonic development of Beethoven.
I have my reservations about the research, which makes some unsubtle assumptions about the way we hear music, and in general reminds me of someone trying to pick up a small delicate object while wearing thick mittens. For instance, it’s simply not true that the wider a melodic interval is, the more complex it will seem. An octave is much wider than a diminished fifth, but the latter is a peculiar interval, and much harder for the ear to process.
A more fundamental issue raised by the research is – why should we take complexity as the measure of artistic value anyway? True, some great works of art are enormously complex, such as the novels of Dickens, and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. And in some ways the arts have become more complex. To stick to classical music for an example, the harmony of a Wagner opera is vastly more complex than the harmony of the operas Mozart was composing 80 years earlier.
But does that mean Wagner’s harmony is therefore better, in the sense of being more subtle, and more expressive of different feelings? I would say no. In fact what is so astonishing about Mozart’s harmony is the way he can stir our feelings with relatively simple moves. There’s a moment in his Magic Flute when the heroine Pamina believes she has lost her beloved Tamino. “Ah my joy for ever vanished” she sings, in heart-broken G minor.
The second phrase seems to carry her and us back to the time when love was in its springtime. Hope and radiance momentarily flood the music, a miracle achieved by the simplest move to a closely related key. It’s a moment of fathomless emotional depth, but the artistic means are not complex: they are subtle. The difference between subtlety and complexity is all-important. Complexity can – with a bit of pushing and shoving – be reduced to numerical quantities, but subtlety never can.
It is to do with the finessing and reinterpretation of basic elements which make up the stock of a society’s cultural knowledge, within a certain art form, at a given moment in history. As the stock gets bigger, so the evocative power of each element diminishes. A simple seventh chord in Mozart can reveal a world; to achieve an effect of similar power Wagner has to unleash a harmonic arsenal.
Move on to today, and we find that every art form has now developed hugely complex technical means, while the collective memory of the art form’s basic, traditional elements is constantly fading away. That’s why the arts tend more and more to pursue shock tactics, to provide the frisson of artistic joy that was once granted by a simple gesture, a lovely melody, a perfect rhyme. Of course not every simple thing in art is wonderful. It might simply be banal or dull.
So yes, music becoming simpler can be a sign of dumbing down. But not necessarily, because whenever we are deeply moved by something, there will always be something simple at its core. And whatever the magic quality is that makes certain kinds of simplicity so telling, we can be sure the laborious statistical methods of the scientists will never find it.
