Science in music

Evolution of musical styles

By Cezary Owerkowicz

we are assured that the people who are involved in music are music composers and performers — playing or singing their works. Maybe it is time that somebody remembers the music teachers, instrument makers (or rather the instruments producers), tuners and technicians, music critics or historians, maybe even the impresarios, records producers and engineers, sound engineers and finally the acoustic specialists and probably this is it.

The music, just like any part of life and human activity, is a subject for r esearches. Many scientists all over the world, not only theorists, musicologists and historians of music, but also physicists, sociologists, psychologists, medics of many specialties (from pediatric doctors to geriatrics) are keen and busy studying and describing the phenomenon of music.

If you complain that these days the hits are all in the same manner you should read the work published in the magazine of the ‘Royal Society Open Science’. It is written by a specialist, with computer-supported statistics in cooperation with the specialists from nature science.

Dr Matthias Mauch has been researching on all compositions released during the last half of the century between 1960 and 2010 on the American Billboard list HOT 100. The compositions (songs) were approximately not less than seventeen thousand. He researched the trends in music which appeared and disappeared. He followed, for example, the frequency of using seven dominant chords and the number of chords changed in the song. He checked when and how often the piano or aggressive percussion was used in the songs.

Owerkowicz

To his research he used the standard computer programs applied to works by evolution scientists. He noticed there were not too many differences between research of the plants or animals history and analyses of music styles. In both samples we have to deal with single samples which we connect into bigger family groups. It is possible to observe the periods of domination of certain groups as well as them disappearing or dying.

Dr Mauch in his just published research found thirteen music styles and described the connections between them. He also discovered that over the past fifty years the evolution of music was developing not in a constant tempo. During 1964, 1983, 1993 there were almost volcanic eruptions of changes and appearance of a lot of innovations — the most boring because of the lack of differences the scientists found in the 1980s.

As you would see, only the research of melodies would offer the daily bread for scores of scientists, but the songs have also texts. This is a field for scrupulous scientists, but physics is out of the question. Dr Simon Singh one time started to analyze the text of the GeorgianBritish singer Katie Melua ‘Nine Million Bicycles’. She sang about love: ‘We are twelve billion light years from the edge/ That’s a guess/ No-one can ever say it’s true/ But I know I will always be with you.’

Dr Singh burst in an attack on the ‘Guardian’ that the singer ‘demonstrates ignorance in cosmic matters and lack of understanding of scientific methods!’ ‘Age and size of the Universe is not ‘a guess’ but the value measured with perfect precision …’ He asked to correct the text ‘We are 13.7 billion light years/ This a good measured value with well described standard mistake,' Scientist say that is the true/ Mentioning that it would be changed after … Katie invited Dr Singh to BBC 4 Studio to try and together record his text, but it appeared not possible to any melody … However Dr Singh was happy: that session gave him more popularity than years of researches and several few hundred long pages he had written.

It appears that our music preferences disclose quite a lot about our personality and this is confirmed by research by Prof Adrian North, psychologist from Edinburgh HeriotWatt University, Scotland, UK.

His research involved 36 thousand people from sixty countries. Everybody filled the questionnaire conerning his features of character as well as listened and described tens of music samples. What it appears? For example, fans of rap have high self-esteem and quite open general attitude. The fans of country music are extroverts but they are mainly hard working. The same would be difficult to say about fans of rock; they don’t love to work too much, even they appear creative, open, likeable and free. However they have tentatively low self esteem.

Generally the most attractive socially are fans of jazz and blues, if we are keen to listening common music for long time. From other side what kind of music would be favorable for our colleague or partner would be quite essential socially: scientists from Cambridge discovered that the youth during the first week of acquaintance talk mainly about music. It is a subject of 58 percent of talks, regardless of the gender and sort of relations; comparing to all other talks as about books, sport, movies or dresses which together make 37 percent.

Have you heard about music influence on the quantity of milk produced by cows? If yes, do you know that it is a subject for scientific research? In 2001 scientists from the University of Leicester, over a nine-week period, played different compositions to thousand of Holstein cows. The animals had to listen patiently twelve-hour long music sessions with different tunes (like slow and fast) while a number of cows were left without any music.

What was the result? The hits on the farm were pieces such as ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM or 6th Symphony ( Pastorale) by Beethoven. Such music increased the milk production to three percent. It may seem not impressive but it means daily one cow gave three liters extra milk, to the contrary cows which heard lively music tunes: such songs like ‘Space Cowboy’ (Jamiroquai) or ‘Pumping On Your Stereo’ (by Supergrass — the name of ensemble would look adequate) did not bring good results.

The scientists explained it is evident the cows prefer relaxing repertoire of slow tunes. In the effect of that research on farms the music repertoire was changed and music applications were implemented on other branches, like chicken.

Music has essential influence on human psychology and it is wellknown already. It is not without reason that music therapy is widely an appreciated method. But also music is used as a tool: in supermarkets we would listen to specially prepared sets of tunes because slow music motivates clients to spend more (even 20 percent) time on shopping.

The psychologists are probably the best represented between scientists providing researches on music. Their results are also often surprising for us. Heavy metal and generally ‘heavier music’ has not so good opinion: so called ‘common sense’ says it initiates aggression and wakes up other unhealthy emotions from one side or — from opposite — depression.

Research by the University of Queensland assures us about something totally different. They held research with fans of heavy playing. First they were asked to remember something irritating, some bad experience with partner, work or financial.

Following it they were asked to listen for ten minutes heavy metal or sit in silence and after they checked their emotions. The result showed after listening to music they became calm and happy than those who sat in silence.

Evidently extreme music did not wake up anger but it was along with actual psychological attitude and defused tension, according to an Australian scientists. It shows us that even listening to heavy rock would be a healthy medicine to cure aggression, of course if you are a fan of that.

Music calms human feelings; even if we are heavy metal musicians? It seems. They were polite even under un-human research in 1997 when they were asked to hear the country music …

Editor’s Note: Cezary Owerkowicz is the chairman of the Kuwait Chamber of Philharmonia and talented pianist. He regularly organises concerts by well-known musicians for the benefit of music lovers and to widen the knowledge of music in Kuwait. His e-mail address is: cowerkowicz @ yahoo.com and cowerkowicz@ hotmail.com