top of page
This site was designed with the
.com
website builder. Create your website today.Start Now

Annotated Bibliography

  1. Kim, Kyle. “The Evolution of Music: How Genres Rise and Fall over Time.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2015, www.latimes.com/visuals/graphics/la-sci-g-music-evolution-20150505-htmlstory.html.

    1. What the resource argues: There’s been shifts in the popularity of different genres over time. For some genres that’s a steady or sharp decrease or increase, for other genres its an oscillating level.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: graphs showing the amount of songs released in each genre over time.

    3. Why the resource is important: It is hard data about genre popularity changing over time, something that not available until recently.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: We are interested in how genre and popularity and time are all interconnected.

 

  1. “6.2 The Evolution of Popular Music.” Understanding Media and Culture: an Introduction to Mass Communication, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, 2016.

    1. What the resource argues: The article argues that people music genre preferences change over time.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: The author uses examples of popular music throughout the ages and tracks how the genres change.

    3. Why the resource is important: This resource is important because it helps support our findings regarding how music style and its popularity changed over time.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: The resource provides further support to add to our data.

 

  1. Mauch, M., et al. “The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960-2010.” Royal Society Open Science, vol. 2, no. 5, 6 May 2015, doi:10.1098/rsos.150081. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4453253/

    1. What the resource argues: Popular music evolved over time due to the changes in cultures, norms and likes.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: The resource uses examples of popular music at the particular time period

    3. Why the resource is important: We want to use the data we have to show how music has changed throughout time as we have a lot of technical music styles vs time data, so by knowing how popular music evolved, we can better analyze and support our findings.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: provide prove to our findings

 

  1. Morelle, Rebecca. “Pop Music Marked by Three Revolutions in 50 Years.” BBC News, BBC, 6 May 2015, www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32599916.

    1. What the resource argues:  The resource argues that pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: The resources provides an analysis of chord changes, timbres, and key and how they changed over time.

    3. Why the resource is important: it provides hard data about when there are big shifts in what characterizes popular music

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: It adds context to the information we have about songs and their key and popularity and release date.

  2. “What Makes a Hit Song? Science Tries to Find the Answer.” Evolver.fm, 10 Jan. 2011, evolver.fm/2011/01/10/what-makes-a-hit-song/.

    1. What the resource argues: There are specific features that are characteristics of popular songs

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: analysis of various song features such as length and BPM  and how that relates to the popularity of the song

    3. Why the resource is important: It uses data to quantify what makes a song popular, providing insight beyond qualitative observations

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: We are interested in the connection between song features and popularity, this helps inform that.

  3. Silver, Daniel et al. “Genre Complexes in Popular Music” PloS one vol. 11,5 e0155471. 20 May. 2016, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155471

Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4874668/

    1. What the resource argues: There are genre conventions that structure popular music. The strength and structure of genre conventions differ across musical styles.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: They analyzed a dataset which included musician profiles on MySpace.com, and used a “community detection” algorithm to find patterns in genre choices.

    3. Why the resource is important: It analyzes data that finds patterns and structures of popular music by genre.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: One of the features of a song includes the song’s genre, and we are able to gain more insight on what genre complexes make a song popular, as well as what methods different popular artists use within multiple genres to adhere to these genre complexes.

  2. Interiano, Myra et al. “Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts” Royal Society Open Science, vol. 5, 16 May 2018,  doi: 10.1098/rsos.171274.

Link: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/5/171274

    1. What the resource argues: The dynamics of success, such as a song making it into the top charts correlate with acoustic features of a song. The predictability of success in music is also analyzed.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: 500,000 songs released between 1985 and 2010. They analyze the Top 100 Singles Chart by the Official Charts Company in the UK

    3. Why the resource is important: It determines what features of a song can make it to the top charts and in turn make it popular. They find what trends over the decades has made a song popular over the years.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: Since we are interested in what trends and features may make a song popular, this article provides us with an analysis of trends that already exist in music within the top charts, which we could use to compare our data with.

  2. Alex Wilson and Bruno Fazenda. “Perception of audio quality in productions of popular music” Acoustics Research Centre, University of Salford, vol. 64, no. 1,5  February 2016, doi: https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2015.0090

Link: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18102

    1. What the resource argues: The perception of the quality of audio in a song and the liking of music can be affected by separate factors, such as loudness and dynamic range compression.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: Audio extracted from commercially released CD’s

    3. Why the resource is important: Provides insight on how audio quality can affect how a song is perceived and it’s popularity.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: Since we have information about the audio of the music, such as the loudness, in our dataset we could make connections to see if that affects popularity. This article could give us more support and evidence to support our argument.

  2. Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. Sound Tracks. Routledge, 2002.

    1. What the resource argues: This resource surmises that the landscape of popular music changes over the course of time, and tracks this evolution.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: Draws on information gathered through the author’s extensive research, as he is an expert in musicology.

    3. Why the resource is important: The resource is important because it corroborates our own hypothesis.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: It provides a background, a reference off which we can compare our findings in our data set to see if the patterns of popular music indeed matchup.

  3. Hogan, Marc. Uncovering How Streaming Is Changing the Sound of Pop. Sept 25, 2017. https://pitchfork.com/features/article/uncovering-how-streaming-is-changing-the-sound-of-pop/

    1. What the resource argues: This article discusses how different ways of listening to music affects the artists that become popular and thus music genres themselves.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: The article refers to Spotify data and case studies, tracking streaming data on the amount of listeners over time.

    3. Why the resource is important: The resource is important because it sheds light on an important factor of what music becomes popular, which is the way we listen to it.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: This resource adds further insight on why popular music changes by looking at a different aspect of the industry which is the programs and methods users consume music, therefore adding credibility to our thesis.

  4. Resnikoff, Paul. What are the Most Popular Music Genres in America? 7 April, 2017. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/04/07/most-popular-music-genres-america/

    1. What the resource argues: This article discusses statistics about which music genres are most popular in the United States and how users consume this music.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: The authors received their data from Nielsen, a credible data and measurement company.

    3. Why the resource is important: The article is important to our research because it adds more factual data that can be used to further support our thesis.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: The resource backs up our thesis with more data adding further credibility.

  5. Weisbard, Eric. 2013. “Beyond Category? Never! The Game of Genres in Popular Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) 25 (3): 401–5. doi:10.1111/jpms.12039.

    1. http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=2c15708f-b47c-41d6-9436-f4f8f1894e82%40sdc-v-sessmgr04

    2. What the resource argues: This article is a book critique on two books, first is Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music by Jennifer Lena. and the second is Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume VIII: Genres: North America by John Shepherd and David Horn. The article discusses what the author believes to be true and false in each.

    3. What the resource uses for evidence: The author uses the two books as resources only.

    4. Why the resource is important: The resource is important because it provides valuable insight on the narrative of the two books, and their main points.

    5. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: The resource adds further information about the subject of music from two different resources by comparing and contrasting them.

  6. Whiteley, Sheila, and Jedediah Sklower. Countercultures and Popular Music. Routledge, 2016.

    1. What the resource argues: The resource argues that throughout the course of history, as trends emerge in the realm of popular music, the sounds of counterculture arise in direct juxtaposition to them, as a form of social protest.

    2. What the resource uses for evidence: Draws on primary and secondary sources regarding the various time periods covered.

    3. Why the resource is important: The resource does not just dwell on the popular tunes of the time: it goes deeper by exploring the social atmosphere at the time of the music.

    4. What the resource does specifically for my thesis: The resource provides a historical context to the research we’ve been doing.

bottom of page