EVOLUTION OF THE INFORMATIONAL COMPLEXITY OF

CONTEMPORARY WESTERN MUSIC

Thomas Parmer, Yong-Yeol Ahn

School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
[email protected], [email protected]

ABSTRACT products are also fashionable — what is popular now may

be completely out of fashion next month. Such seemingly
We measure the complexity of songs in the Million contrasting observations prompt us to ask the following
Song Dataset (MSD) in terms of pitch, timbre, loudness, questions: as fads come and go, is there still a consistent
and rhythm to investigate their evolution from 1960 to preference towards the optimal amount of complexity in
2010. By comparing the Billboard Hot 100 with random cultural products? How has the complexity of contempo-
samples, we find that the complexity of popular songs rary cultural products changed over time?
tends to be more narrowly distributed around the mean, This question may apply to any type of cultural prod-
supporting the idea of an inverted U-shaped relationship uct, but we focus here on the complexity of contemporary
between complexity and hedonistic value. We then exam- Western songs. Although various studies have already re-
ine the temporal evolution of complexity, reporting consis- ported evidence of the ‘inverted U-shaped’ relationship be-
tent changes across decades, such as a decrease in aver- tween perceived complexity and the pleasantness of mu-
age loudness complexity since the 1960s, and an increase sic in terms of individual-level preference [1, 11, 32], ev-
in timbre complexity overall but not for popular songs. idence of this preference at the population-level is un-
We also show, in contrast to claims that popular songs clear [7, 22, 30], and many past studies have been limited
sound more alike over time, that they are not more similar by the size or extent of the data, in terms of genres or tem-
than they were 50 years ago in terms of pitch or rhythm, poral range.
although similarity in timbre shows distinctive patterns
Recently, datasets such as the Million Song Dataset
across eras and similarity in loudness has been increasing.
(MSD) began to allow researchers to systematically ana-
Finally, we show that musical genres can be differentiated
lyze patterns in music at a massive scale [6, 8, 26]. For
by their distinctive complexity profiles.
example, Serra et al. used musical ‘codewords’ based
on song segments in the MSD to identify changes in
1. INTRODUCTION pitch, timbre, and loudness over time, finding that newer
Our everyday life is surrounded by cultural products; we songs restrict pitch transitions, homogenize timbre, and in-
wake up to a song, read a book on the subway, watch a crease loudness (without increasing the variability in loud-
movie with friends, or even travel far to admire a piece ness) [26]. Mauch et al. used a corpus of 17,000 songs
of art. Despite such pervasiveness, we cannot fully ex- from the Billboard Hot 100 to analyze how popular music
plain why we like a particular song over others or what has evolved between 1960 and 2010 in the United States;
makes something a great piece of art. Although the per- using timbral and harmonic features derived from songs on
ceived quality of a piece is affected by numerous contex- the Hot 100, they identified three stylistic revolutions that
tual factors, including one’s cultural, social, and emotional occurred in 1964, 1983, and 1991 [15].
background, theories suggest that preference, or ‘hedonis- In this paper, we analyze the large-scale evolution of
tic value’, may also be affected by innate properties of the complexity in contemporary music in terms of pitch, loud-
products, such as novelty and complexity [1, 18, 28]. In ness, timbre, and rhythm, during the period from 1960 to
particular, a popular theory suggests there is a Goldilocks 2010 using the Million Song Dataset (MSD) [4]. We find
principle — that just the right amount of novelty or com- that complexity does seem to constrain popularity, as evi-
plexity elicits the largest amount of pleasure, whereas denced by the most popular songs (those on the Billboard
pieces with too little or too much complexity are less in- Hot 100) clustering around average values and exhibiting
teresting and enjoyable [3]. On the other hand, cultural smaller variance compared to a random sample. However,
complexity values do fluctuate over time, as long-term
trends are seen in loudness, timbre, and rhythm complex-

c Thomas Parmer, Yong-Yeol Ahn. Licensed under a Cre- ity and in the similarity between songs on the Billboard
ative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). At-
tribution: Thomas Parmer, Yong-Yeol Ahn. “Evolution of the Informa-
Hot 100. Finally, we compare the complexity of different
tional Complexity of Contemporary Western Music”, 20th International genres and find that genres have characteristic complexity
Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Delft, The Nether- profiles, leading us to hypothesize that complexity may be
lands, 2019. a factor in an individual’s musical selection.

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 Proceedings of the 20th ISMIR Conference, Delft, Netherlands, November 4-8, 2019

35000 codewords are defined as the number of average sixteenth

All Songs
Billboard Hot 100 notes between segments, where the average sixteenth note
Total Number of Songs

200

Billboard Hot 100

is based on the time signature. We then defined a mea-
25000 sure of complexity for each feature per song based on the
150
conditional entropy of each type of codeword. 1
15000 100

5000 50 2.3 Measuring Complexity

Although many studies have examined the relationship be-

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
tween the complexity of a piece and the derived pleasure
Year
from it [1, 19–21, 31, 32], there is no universally adopted
way to measure the complexity of a song. Existing defi-
Figure 1. The number of songs per year. ‘All Songs’ nitions of complexity include hierarchical complexity, dy-
refers to the filtered MSD dataset, while ‘Billboard Hot namic complexity, information-theoretic complexity, and
100’ refers to those songs whose title and artist we matched cognitive complexity [10,23,27,34]. Information-theoretic
with songs on the Hot 100 as identified in [15]. measures are attractive because they capture the surprise
inherent in a pattern, such as the notes played in a mu-
2. METHODS sical piece. Theories propose that music can be under-
stood as the kinetics of expectation and surprise, and that
2.1 Data composers seek to elicit emotions by fulfilling or denying
The MSD is a dataset of one million songs created by these expectations [1, 17, 35]. In particular, Implication-
Columbia University’s LabROSA in collaboration with realization (IR) theory posits that open intervals evoke ex-
The Echo Nest [4]. Each song in the dataset is divided pectations in a listener and the surprises of these expecta-
into small temporal segments (based on note onsets) with tions may be related to complexity [18, 32, 35].
detailed data derived from the song’s audio signal, and in- Information-theoretic measures include Shannon en-
cludes metadata such as title, artist, year, duration, and tropy, joint entropy, conditional entropy, compression or
genre terms. algorithmic complexity [10, 16, 27, 29], and more compli-
Prior to analysis, we filtered the MSD to remove dupli- cated techniques such as pairwise predictability between
cates, songs with missing genre or duration metadata, and time series, Hidden Markov Models, Normalized Com-
songs likely to be commentary pieces (whose title included pression Distance, and predictive information rate [1, 8, 9].
the tokens ‘interview’, ‘commentary’, ‘introduction’, ‘dis- Previous studies have used information-theoretic quanti-
cuss’, ‘conference’, or ‘intro’), resulting in a dataset of ties to estimate perceived complexity, identify piece sim-
905,896 songs. Some songs also did not have all data types ilarity, derive psycho-acoustic features, and classify gen-
— pitch, loudness, timbre, rhythm, or year — that we ex- res [5, 10, 13, 25, 27, 30].
amine here and were thus left out of the corresponding cal- We use conditional entropy as our measure of complex-
culations. Due to a limited amount of data from the early ity, dependent on the immediately preceding symbol, as
years, we restricted our analysis to the period from 1960 it is known that events during even short preceding inter-
to 2010. The genre of each song was determined by the vals are enough to evoke strong expectations in the lis-
term (Echo Nest tag) with the strongest weight, although tener [1, 12, 35]. Other information-theoretic measures are
we note that terms are assigned at the artist level so all either more complicated (e.g. predictive information mea-
songs by the same artist are grouped into the same genre. sures), can only be approximated in practice (e.g. Kol-
To discover the most popular musical pieces in our mogorov or algorithmic complexity), or do not take past
dataset, we found 6,661 songs which charted on the Bill- information into account (e.g. Shannon entropy).
board Hot 100 as identified in a previous study [15]. The Each song was assigned a complexity value for pitch,
number of songs per year in our final dataset is shown in loudness, timbre, and rhythm, which is equal to the condi-
Figure 1. tional entropy of the feature codewords:

2.2 Codewords X
H(Y |X) = p(x)H(Y |X = x) =
To estimate complexity, we defined “codewords” for each xX (1)
song across four dimensions (pitch, loudness, timbre, and −
X
p(x)
X
p(y|x) log2 p(y|x)
rhythm), similar to a previous study [26]. Each codeword xX yY
is based on a segment of the song. Pitch and timbre code-
words are vectors containing the pitches (based on the bi- where X and Y are possible codewords, p(x) is the
nary presence of each of 12 pitches in the chromatic scale) probability of observing codeword x and p(y|x) is the
and timbres (based on analysis of the audio signal, with probability of observing codeword y given the previous
11 components thresholded into three bins) present in the codeword x.
segment. Loudness codewords are equal to the binned
maximum decibel value of the segment. Similarly, rhythm 1 Code is available at https://github.com/tjparmer/music-complexity.

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3. RESULTS ness complexity has been decreasing overall, although the

period from 1983 to 1991 shows a slight increase; the tim-
3.1 Complexity and Popularity
bre complexity has been steadily increasing and reached a
The complexity distribution of songs is approximately plateau after the 1990s; finally, the rhythm complexity was
bell-shaped, although timbre is skewed towards zero com- decreasing through the period from 1964 to 1983, and then
plexity — unlike the other features, timbre becomes easily stabilized.
predictable after only one previous codeword. The distri- Meanwhile, we find that the temporal evolution of the
butions of the Hot 100 songs are similar, although the Hot Hot 100 songs does not follow the overall pattern. The
100 tends to exhibit statistically lower complexity in pitch largest difference can be observed in the timbre complex-
and timbre and higher loudness complexity, compared to ity. While the timbre complexity of the entire dataset has
95% confidence intervals of 1,000 bootstrap random sam- been steadily increasing, it has been almost completely
ples of the same size (see Fig. 2). Furthermore, we found flat for the most popular songs, diverging from the overall
that the variances of the Hot 100 complexity values are trend. This may indicate that the emergence of new gen-
smaller than for other songs (based on 95% confidence in- res with high timbre complexity primarily happened for
tervals of 1,000 bootstrap samples from the Hot 100 com- more niche musical tastes. Pitch and loudness complexity,
pared to 1,000 bootstrap samples from the overall distri- by contrast, have been higher for popular songs in recent
bution); thus, the popular songs tend to be located in a years, while rhythm complexity was lower until the 2000s.
narrower range near the mean across pitch, loudness, and
rhythm complexity. This result supports the theory for an 3.3 Popular Song Similarity
inverted U-shaped curve where global popularity is maxi-
mized by medium complexity. The analysis of complexity over time suggests that modern
day popular songs (at least from the 2000s) are more likely
to have higher pitch, loudness, and rhythm complexity (and
3.2 Complexity Across Time
lower timbre complexity) than their less popular contem-
To examine the evolution of song complexity, we calculate poraries. However, while this suggests that popular songs
the mean complexity values for each year (for all songs are not simpler than the average song, it does not necessar-
and the Hot 100 songs separately) in Fig. 3, which shows ily indicate whether they sound more or less similar to their
several long-term trends. Later years mark the appearance popular contemporaries (that is, other Hot 100 songs that
of songs with low loudness and rhythm complexity and are released in the same year). A recent report suggests that
songs with high timbre complexity, but they were not re- popular songs are sounding more and more similar to other
flected strongly in the Hot 100 songs. The low loudness songs on the charts [33]. In contrast, other research finds
complexity may be due to the trend often called the “loud- that songs that perform well on the charts do not sound
ness war” [26], which describes the tendency to produce too similar to their contemporaries but often have an opti-
the entire song to be as loud as possible. Another possi- mal level of differentiation [2]. To analyze whether pop-
ble reason may be the emergence of low complexity gen- ular songs become more similar to their contemporaries
res in recent years. For instance, terms associated with over time, we measure the Kullback-Leibler (KL) diver-
low loudness complexity outliers include ‘grindcore’, ‘hip gence [14] from each song in the Hot 100 to other popular
hop’, and ‘black metal’, all of which are relatively newer songs that were released in the same year. KL divergence
genres in the dataset. Low rhythm and high timbre com- captures the unexpectedness of a song’s codewords given
plexity may be due to pop or electronic music that contain the codewords present in other popular songs and thus in-
modern production techniques with many different synthe- dicates the spread of codeword usage per year.
sized textures and strong dance beats. Terms associated In Fig. 4, we show the KL divergence per year for each
with low rhythm outliers include ‘tech house’, ‘techno’, feature, with each epoch marked. Larger KL divergence
and ‘hard trance’, while terms associated with high tim- in the figure suggests that the songs in that year are more
bre complexity outliers include ‘tech house’, ‘techno’, and different from their contemporaries as compared to other
‘deep house’. years. Our measurement shows that the 1964-1983 and
Previous research has indicated that the evolution of 1991-2010 period are similar to each other while 1983-
Western popular music experienced significant changes 1991 shows a reversing trend. Across features, the KL
during three musical ‘revolutions’ in 1964, 1983, and 1991 divergence was either decreasing (songs are more similar
[15]. The first was associated with rock and soul music, to each other) or stable during 1964-1983 and 1991-2010,
the second with disco, new wave, and hard rock, and the while 1983-1991 marked either a positive trend reversal
third with the emerging popularity of rap music over rock or a slow-down of the decreasing trend. These changing
music. These three revolutions split our period of analy- trends suggest that musical revolutions are not born equal;
sis into three ‘epochs’: 1964-1983, 1983-1991, and 1991- some may have spurred diversity among popular songs
2010. With this reference frame, we examine our measures while some may have homogenized the field.
of complexity. Despite these fluctuations, the divergence trend is
If we consider the entire dataset, each aspect of com- roughly stable over time for pitch and rhythm, while tim-
plexity shows a different pattern. The pitch complexity has bre rebounds after similarity decreases; thus, our findings
been more or less stable across the whole period; the loud- are consistent with research that songs that perform well

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Pitch Loudness Timbre Rhythm

0.12 0.12 0.12 Random 0.12
Proportion of Songs

Sample
0.09 0.09 0.09 Hot 0.09
100
0.06 0.06 0.06 0.06
0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03
0.00 1 2 3 4 5 0.00 1 2 3 4 5 0.00 0.1 0.4 0.7 1.0 1.3 0.00 1 2 3 4 5
Complexity (bits) Complexity (bits) Complexity (bits) Complexity (bits)
Hot 100 Hot 100 Hot 100 Hot 100
all songs all songs all songs all songs
pop pop pop pop
hip hop hip hop hip hop hip hop
jazz jazz jazz jazz
heavy metal heavy metal heavy metal heavy metal
electronica electronica electronica electronica
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4
Variance Variance Variance Variance

Figure 2. Feature complexities and variances. Complexity distributions are shown (in bins of 0.1 bits, except for timbre
which is in bins of 0.02 bits). The variance plots include 95% confidence intervals in black (although confidence intervals
are smaller than the symbol and not visible), based on 1000 bootstrap samples of 1000 songs from the respective genre.

on the charts do not sound too similar to their contempo- they prefer pitch and loudness complexity, they may prefer
raries but rather maintain a degree of uniqueness which is hip hop or jazz. If they care about timbre and rhythm over
statistically consistent over time. pitch and loudness, they may prefer heavy metal. There is
a positive correlation between pitch and loudness complex-
ity (Pearson’s r=0.77) across all songs, suggesting that gen-
3.4 Complexity Across Genres
res tend to have high pitch and loudness complexity (e.g.
Let us turn our attention to musical genres and their com- hip hop, jazz) or low pitch and loudness complexity (e.g.
plexity. As some genres may be characterized by complex heavy metal). There is also a negative correlation seen be-
harmonic structures or simple, repeated patterns, we ex- tween timbre and rhythm complexity (Pearson’s r=-0.55),
pect to see differences across different genres in terms of suggesting that rhythmic complexity decreases with higher
complexity. For example, jazz is often considered to have timbre complexity (although this is not true for metal gen-
complex patterns whereas dance music may be assumed to res).
use simpler rhythmic patterns. Our measurement concurs Interestingly, the Hot 100 is similar to the pop genre in
with such speculation, but finds that different subsets of feature means and variances (although statistically differ-
genres may be relatively complex across one or two fea- ent). Both pop music (whose songs are given no genre-
tures but not others. For instance, electronic and dance specific term with higher weight than ‘pop’) and the Hot
styles tend to have high pitch complexity values, whereas 100 (whose songs are primarily classified as genres other
jazz and blues have high loudness complexity values. The than ‘pop’) have near average values of pitch, loudness,
highest timbre complexity values belong to electronic gen- and rhythm complexity, and lower than average values of
res, although metal also scores highly, but electronic gen- timbre complexity, while also having smaller variance than
res have reduced rhythmic complexity which is instead the other selected genres (refer to Figures 2 and 6). This
maximal in jazz, progressive and vocal genres. may suggest that listeners expect the same from listening
We found that a variety of common genres were sig- to the Hot 100 as they do when listening to music labeled
nificantly different from a random sample drawn from the as ‘pop’: mildly surprising songs that do not vary too much
overall distribution in terms of each feature complexity in complexity and which are sonically predictable.
(based on a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnoff nonpara- One may also expect similar genres to share similar
metric test as well as 95% confidence intervals of the complexity scores. We used agglomerative clustering on
means of each feature), with the exception that pop was not genres represented with over 5000 songs in the dataset (a
rhythmically distinct. Thus each genre seems to have dis- total of 41 genres), using Euclidean distance between the
tinctive complexity features that describe its songs: jazz is genre mean complexity scores of each feature, and then
relatively complex (except in terms of timbre), hip hop has used the silhouette coefficient [24, 28] to find nine opti-
higher than average pitch and loudness complexity, heavy mal communities. The result matches intuitive expecta-
metal has high rhythm complexity but low pitch and loud- tions, such that rock genres are grouped together as are
ness complexity, and electronica has high timbre complex- electronic genres; interestingly jazz is grouped with hip
ity but low rhythm complexity (Fig. 6). hop and rap, due to these genres having similar complexity
This pattern may be indicative of some trade-offs that scores. These results suggest that a genre may be defined,
listeners make. If they prefer timbre at the expense of to some degree, by its pitch, loudness, timbre, and rhyth-
rhythmic complexity, they may prefer electronic genres. If mic complexity.

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 Proceedings of the 20th ISMIR Conference, Delft, Netherlands, November 4-8, 2019

Complexity over time across features

Pitch 2.4
2.2
2.0
Complexity (bits) 3.3
Loudness 3.1
2.9

0.3
Timbre 0.2
0.1

3.0
Rhythm 2.8
2.6
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
1964 1983 1991
Year
All Songs Hot 100 All Songs best fit Hot 100 best fit

Figure 3. Average complexity over time across features. Linear trend lines (obtained using OLS linear regression) are
shown for each epoch, along with 95% confidence intervals of the mean. Light blue lines indicate the musical revolutions
found in [15].

Yearly KL divergence across features

Pitch 2.3
2.1
1.9
Divergence from Yearly Hot 100

1.1
Loudness 0.8
0.5

7.8
Timbre 7.3
6.8

0.6
Rhythm 0.5
0.4
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
1964 1983 1991
Year
Figure 4. Yearly KL divergence of Hot 100 songs across features. Complexity variance, as measured by KL divergence
between a song’s codewords and codewords from other songs released in that year, shows changing trends at the time of
certain musical ‘revolutions’ in 1964, 1983, and 1991 (indicated by light blue lines). Linear trend lines (obtained using
OLS linear regression) are shown for each epoch, along with 95% confidence intervals of the mean.

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 Proceedings of the 20th ISMIR Conference, Delft, Netherlands, November 4-8, 2019

0.7
0.6
0.5
Distance

0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.0
ssi ho e

rd z
have house

eu l-out
tr e
fut lectce
ure ro
trip jazz
ch hop

nc op
d p
po isco
sm hip h p
ga oth op
st zz
roo azz f rap
ts unk

ga nceh e
alt heavge r ll
ern y m ock
ea tive m tal

rim ccmd
co liste tal
sofy rocg
blu t ro k
es ck
fol -rock
an k
allon

podie rock
we ock
bri rt ro p
po tish p ck
st- op
ern nge
ve k
po rock

vo wavk
ca e

p
ha l jaz
ra a

chk roc

ati roc

w c
gre eep ous

rd us

da egga
o

tr in

a po

bo
ng ja

ne p ro
e an

da op
ep

s
pr

a e
sy e
un n

in tal r

gru
j er

r
il
pro d ch h

b
r

en
o
te

alt
pe
ex
Figure 5. Dendrogram of top genres. Clustering is based on the Euclidean distance between complexity features. Colors
indicate different communities.

Complexity per genre 100 are distributed around the overall feature means with
0.3 jazz electronica
small variance in complexity, the exception being timbre
Deviation from average

hip hop which is lower than average. Indeed, the Hot 100 is simi-
0.2 lar to songs labeled as ‘pop’, in that pop also has average
0.1 pitch, loudness, and rhythm complexity and low variance.
This result provides evidence of a global, inverted U-
0.0 shaped relationship between popularity and complexity,
0.1 where popular songs are, on average, the most pleasant to
the population. Listeners may expect popular songs to be
0.2 pop
mildly complex, but not to deviate far from expected tim-
Hot 100
0.3 heavy metal
bre or complexity norms. Complexity of the Hot 100 has
in fact been consistent over fifty years in pitch and tim-
Pitch Loudness Timbre Rhythm bre, while increasing recently in rhythm and decreasing in
loudness. Similarly, popular songs continue to maintain
a consistent level of differentiation from their contempo-
Figure 6. Complexity of select genres across features. For raries in terms of pitch, timbre, and rhythm.
each feature, the deviation of the genre complexity mean Certain genres do differ significantly across complex-
from the mean of 100 bootstrapped samples of the same ity features, suggesting that they have specific complexity
size as the genre is shown. Note the similarity between the profiles that help define them. We hypothesize that certain
Hot 100 and the pop genre. genres may ‘make up’ for lack of complexity in one area
by increased complexity in another. Perhaps fans of elec-
tronic genres prioritize complexity in timbre but rhythmi-
4. DISCUSSION
cally simple dance beats, or metal fans prioritize rhythmic
Understanding and characterizing the complexity of music complexity and high volume at the expense of loudness
is an important area of study with both cultural and eco- complexity.
nomic significance. Although music may seem compli- More research needs to be done to fully elucidate the
cated, songs quickly become predictable as you take pre- relationship between complexity and musical appreciation.
vious knowledge into account. This suggests that condi- For example, future research can relate musical complex-
tional entropy may be a useful way to characterize musi- ity to the listening habits of people on a large scale to de-
cal complexity, although our approach here assumes that termine a more fine-grained measure of song popularity.
the uniform distribution of codewords is the state of maxi- The consistency of popular songs over time suggests that,
mum uncertainty and expectations are made based on only collectively, people tend towards songs that are a certain
one previous symbol, which cannot distinguish counts of optimal level of complexity rather than being too simple
repeating patterns or phrasing [1]. Our approach is thus in- or complicated. However, it remains an open question to
trinsic to the song itself and ignores any a priori contextual what degree complexity plays a role in people’s cognitive
information. appreciation of music.
Using this measure, we find that pitch complexity has
been generally stable over the period from 1960 to 2010,
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