Is Melody “Dead?”: A Large-scale Analysis of Pop Music Melodies from 1960 through 2019

Abstract

In this paper we theorize that there are specific musical features that contribute to a melody’s character which we define as melodiousness and conduct a large-scale corpus analysis to examine whether there are differences in the melodiousness of popular hit songs from the 1960s compared with present-day pop songs. To carry out the corpus analysis, we use a new approach for generating symbolic data for popular music melodies to overcome the lack of preexisting symbolic data. In addition, we attempt to answer the question of whether any key characteristics of melodiousness appear to have changed or shifted in notable ways over time.