Summary of “Uptown Funk”
I chose to use the song “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars as one of the key examples of
pop music structure. It has an instantly catching melody and stylistically recalls the popular R&B and
Soul music of the 70’s with a horn section having a strong presence throughout the song. It was selected
for an example because it was at the number one spot of the Billboard Hot 100, a chart that ranks the
popularity of music singles, for an astonishing 14 weeks, the most of any song from the 2010’s. When
played through “The Infinite Jukebox”, an online program that repeats a song endlessly and gives a
visual representation of repeating notes and rhythms throughout the song, “Uptown Funk” has a strong
three-pronged graph that is common in the structure of pop music showing the exact repetition of a
chorus.
Summary of “Is independent creation likely to happen in pop music?”
This is an article from Musicae Scientiae, a European music journal, written by Dr.Klaus Frieler of
Hamburg University, and Frank Riedemann of the High School of Music and Theater in Hamburg. In this
article they discuss the results of an experiment in which they test the likelihood of independent
recreation occurring. Independent recreation is a defense used in plagiarism lawsuits for music in which
they argue the melody of the song is similar, but the recreation was not influenced by the original
because there was no way the defendant would have heard it. This test took participants of varying
levels of musicality and gave them the same pop chord structure to make a melody over. Their results
were tested against each other and other pop songs using the structure. The results were similarities in
more than two cases and that more than likely this happened without influence from the other song.
Summary of “The Shazam Effect”
In an article written by Derek Thompson, a senior editor for The Atlantic, he discusses the use of
technology within the music industry to predict the next big hits and stars. Shazam is an app that listens
to songs and tells the user what the name of the song is and the artist. This feature is useful for the user,
but record labels and promoters use data from the app to track where certain songs or artists are
gaining more interest. This is a change from the older methods of signing bands where a scout would go
see the band or a record label executive would listen to a demo and decide if they saw potential in the
band. Other music technology such as Spotify are being used to do the same thing, but this is leading to
a saturation of the radio market with the most popular songs being played up to 50% more than the top
songs from even 10 years ago. Using technology to render music into data is making pop music more
homogenous as it takes the personal touch out labels and stations picking the artists to sign or play.
Summary of “Rolling in the Deep”
I chose the song “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele as another prime example of pop music in recent
times. It is ranked as number four on Billboard’s list of most popular and highest selling songs of the
2010’s and had a seven week run at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. A popular song that reached
number one in eleven countries, in the style of the blues which is a traditional American style,
performed by an artist from the U.K., “Rolling in the Deep” exemplifies the intermixing of music on a
global scale. When run through The Infinite Jukebox program, this song demonstrated the strong 3 sided
graph indicating the 3 chorus structure that occurs in a striking number of recent pop songs.
Summary of “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music”
This is an article written to analyze and interpret the data gathered from the million song
dataset, a music processing software that has given data about one million songs across all genres from
1955-2010 and categorized them based on pitch, timbre, and loudness. Loudness is the intrinsic volume
the song was recorded at, timbre being the range of different sounds produced by different
instruments, and pitch is the combination of notes producing the chords and melody. The data received
has shown that music is becoming more homogenous as the loudness has been increased, while the
range of timbre and pitches has decreased.