Pop Music is Stuck on Repeat | Colin Morris | TEDxPenn

[Music] [Music] today I'm gonna show you how I proved what everyone already knew that the lyrics of pop songs are getting more and more repetitive but I also hope to convince you this is actually a good thing I wanted to measure repetitiveness in pop songs I know a repetitive song when I hear one but it's surprisingly difficult to translate that intuition into an algorithm there are a lot of reasonable sounding approaches that turn out not to work for example counting the number of repeated words because it doesn't just matter which words you use but how you use them songs may repeat individual words but they also repeat phrases and whole lines and big chunks of lines a good measure of repetitiveness needs to account for repetition at multiple scales the solution to this came from an unlikely place namely compression algorithms to measure a song's repetitiveness I essentially squeezed it into a zip file and measured how much it shrank the more it compresses the more repetitive it is the intuition here is that repetitive lyrics are more redundant and a good compression algorithm can aggressively exploit redundancy at any scale to shrink text more efficiently I applied this measurement to 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 and this was the distribution of compression rates in general pop lyrics compressed very well a typical piece of prose such as an essay only gets reduced in size by about 10% by the compression algorithm but an average song gets cut in half also the most repetitive songs are really repetitive when I made this chart I left out the 20 most repetitive songs in the data set but here's what it looks like with them added back in and what is the most repetitive song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 according to our metric it turns out to be around the world by Daft Punk which gets reduced in size by an astonishing 98 percent by the compression algorithm if you're not familiar with the song here are the lyrics and this is heartening to see because it agrees with our intuition about what a repetitive song looks like so now that we have a metric for confident in let's get back to that question our pop lyrics getting more repetitive over time it turns out that yes they are the average repetitiveness of the charts has gone up over time much in the way the stock market has gone up over time some years it goes up in some use it goes down but if you look over any 10-year period it's always increased in addition to measuring the aggregate trend I wanted to look at individual songs and see where and how their repetitiveness manifested I wanted the visual language of the structure of songs and for this I borrowed from another unlikely fields bioinformatics this is what's called a self similarity matrix or a dot plot biologists use them to visualize DNA sequences and DNA is a bit like a pop song it repeats itself in interesting ways and on different scales so here on the Left we have a visualization of some DNA and on the right is Lady Gaga's Bad Romance Lady Gaga has been accused of copying Madonna but until now has anyone considered whether she's plagiarizing the human genome the matrix on the right was constructed using the same method as the one on the left the only difference is that rather than considering a sequence of bases in DNA now we're considering a sequence of words in a song here's a small example of how this works we can imagine the words of the song arranged along the rows and the columns of the matrix time passes from top to bottom and left to right when a row and call have the same word the corresponding cell gets filled in the main diagonal running from top left to bottom right is always filled in because the first word always matches the first word and so on the interesting stuff is what's happening away from that main diagonal patterns off the main diagonal represent two different points in time but have the same text in this case the phrase a barred knee generally the more of these patterns we see the more repetitive the song is now let's return to a full pop song this is Tik Tok by Ke$ha structurally it's about as conventional as it gets let's break down what's going on the song starts with a verse verses are by definition not repeated so we can visually recognize them by the gutters that they form and the corresponding rows and columns that is to say they don't look very much like any other part of the song and we have another verse about halfway through and then there are these repeated green diagonals anytime we see a big chunk of song that's exactly repeated a few times it's probably a chorus and that's what these green blocks are that make up most of the rest of the song finally we have a bridge about 3/4 of the way through the bridge isn't repeated elsewhere but in this case unlike the verses it's internally repetitive it has a unique structure that distinguishes it from the verses and from the chorus putting it all together we got the recipe for a vanilla pop song first chorus first chorus bridge chorus browse through some recent hits and you'll see plenty that follow roughly this pattern though each brings its own flavor sometimes the chorus is just a straight line of repeated words sometimes the chorus has a rich internal structure of its own repetition within repetition some songs lead with the chorus and some make us wait a long time for it and some dispense with the concepts of verse and chorus entirely and just do their own thing and this is particularly true when we look at some of the most repetitive examples in the data set that is the most compressible songs so the evidence is right in front of our eyes pop music is really repetitive and it's getting more and more repetitive year by year does this sound like bad news well now I want to try to convince you otherwise let's return to that meme I showed at the beginning what's the joke here at the very least there's an implication that the song on the left should be easier to write than the song on the right because it's repetitive and so it's funny that the simple song has so many writers and producers whereas the non repetitive one has only one but it's likely that anyone sharing this on Facebook would also agree with the following statements that the song on the left is worse than the song on the right that music as a whole is getting worse because it's getting more repetitive that repetitive songs like the one on the left are droning unimaginative recycled lazy when I originally published my wrist on this topic I was aghast to see that some readers thought that I was one of those people that I was making a point about the decline of music but that couldn't be further from the truth in fact I love repetitive music and whether they want to admit it or not everyone loves repetitive music psychologists have shown this experimentally one study found that artificially inserting repetitiveness into classical compositions caused listeners to rate them as not just catchy but as being of higher quality and the charts reflects this let's go back to that trend and repetitiveness in the charts over time the blue line is averaged over all songs that reached the top 100 in each year but this orange line is only songs that reach the top 10 the top 10 are more repetitive than the rest of the charts in every single year from 1960 to present and the gap seems to be widening I was astonished by the consistency of this trend so arguably songwriters are just giving us what we want listeners respond positively to repetitiveness what about those words that our hypothetical Facebook friend uses to describe repetitive pop songs mindless lazy unimaginative I want to argue against those two because repetitive songs can be repetitive in an endless variety of ways remember those matrices structurally pop songs are snowflakes and paradoxically the most repetitive songs are also some of the most diverse looking this is can't get you out of my head by Kylie Minogue it's highly compressible insanely catchy and structurally fascinating the first thing we notice is these big black blocks what are those they represent ultra dense regions of internal repetition parts of the song where everything looks like everything else these black holes of repetition arise when a single word is chanted in succession in this case that word is just la one of the songs mean hooks which it jumps into right at the start just goes la la la la la la la la in fact the lyrics of this song are about 47% law by volume after introducing that la hook we got the songs other main hook which has a few more words but is still short and sweet it mostly consists of repetitions of the title phrase which is colored pink here I just can't get you out of my head virtually the entire song is built out of these two short simple hooks here's another strange one by the singer Lorde in a sense this song is also highly repetitive again we're at a loss to find anything that we could call a verse there's no part of the song that isn't repeated at some other point but whereas the previous song was built out of just two short hypnotic hooks this one has a lot of distinct repeating parts and none of them is repeated very many times and the fact that these patterns all occur close to the main diagonal tells us that when parts are repeated the repeated instances are close in time to one another there's no chorus no global hook that runs throughout the song as holdest creates a very different effect than the use of repetition in previous song kinkajou out of my head is on the surface a song about obsessive love but it's also a song about being an earworm the relentless repetition of short hypnotic hooks worked because it was a case of form matching content it employs artful repetition to put a virus in the listeners mind that they can't get out of their head whereas this one is telling a story with a beginning middle and end she meets a boy they fall in love it falls apart she wants it back the repetitions are about reinforcing or reiterating an earlier piece of the narrative contrasting the latest development with what came before both the previous songs were highly repetitive but they were repetitive in ways that were very different from each other and from any other song on the radio it would be hard to defend labeling them as unoriginal or boring also repetitiveness may be on the rise lately but it's always been an essential ingredient of music and verse poets often repeat the same phrase at the beginning of several lines the technical term for this is anaphora but when Lady gaga does it we're more likely to use the term lazy when a top 40 song repeats the same short melody on a loop without variation we might dismiss it as monotonous but once again when a respectable artist we have a respectable sound in Greek word for it we call it an ostinato and the parallels to poetry are more than superficial pop music is just poetry with a bead songwriters use repetitive patterns of syllabic stress just like poets - you might remember from high school English Shakespeare's plays were mostly in iambic pentameter meaning built out of pairs of unstressed syllables followed by stressed but uh da da da da da da it turns out that the Britney Spears classic baby one more time is also mostly iambic did Britney or Max Martin the songs writer sit down and think to themselves I'd like this chorus to be an iambic tetrameter no but at least subconsciously they knew what Shakespeare and every other poet knows which is that regular patterns of alternating stress just sound nice the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in song is as natural as the alternation of the kick drum and the snare also notice than the first line Spears sings loneliness rather than the normal stress we would use in conversation loneliness so we know the song isn't I am too curly by coincidence she's fighting to adhere to that meter Shakespeare didn't Hugh strictly to iambic pentameter sometimes often for deliberate effect he would replace an eye on da da with a trochee the opposite of that ba da like gentle sometimes he would break the flow even more strongly by making an entire line trochaic badah badah badah badah does that rhythm sound familiar well Brittany does something similar the penultimate line of the chorus introduces a variation with one trophy in one eye and and the final line flips the script by being entirely trochaic it's clever in a few ways first the inversion mirrors a shift in a story brittany goes from plaintively describing her emotional state to making a demand and you simply can't start a sentence with hit me and not that emphasis on the hit it's also commercially shrewd the punchy contrasting rhythm of that final line makes it memorable and but final line also happens to be the of the song so repetition and music is nothing new it can be employed with endless variation and it's inherently enjoyable and yet there seems to be a default assumption that pop music is noxious because anything so addictive must be bad for you and anything with such wide appeal must be dumbed down or without artistic merit but I want to question those assumptions bubblegum pop earworms shouldn't be a guilty pleasure they're just a pleasure whether on the surface level as something to sing along to in the car or as an object of deeper investigation I'm glad that songwriters are honing their techniques to create increasingly catchy and repetitive earworms so yeah music just ain't what it used to be but maybe it's better thanks [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 970,260

Rating: 4.5309033 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Entertainment, Music (topic), Poetry, Song

Id: _tjFwcmHy5M

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/randomFUCKfromcherry]

Those DNA matrices of a song are fucking beautiful. I’d frame some of those on my wall. I’d love if someone made a generator where you could plug a song’s lyrics in and see what it looks like.

Really cool video, thanks for sharing

[u/marymelodic]

Vox Earworm video about Colin Morris's work - "Why we really really really like repetition in music".