A new study published in the “Royal Society Open Science” journal shows Hip Hop has affected the music landscape more than any genre.
Researchers at Queen Mary and Imperial College London came to the conclusion that Hip Hop’s impact has meant more to music than The Beatles’ explosion in the 1960s.
The study focuses on musical patterns in the US pop charts from 1960 to 2010 by analyzing music properties of approximately 17,000 recordings that charted. With help from from music website Last.fm, the researchers gathered their data and employed methods such as signal processing and text-mining to examine the musical properties of songs.
The lead author of the study, Matthias Mauch, spoke to The Guardian about his “groundbreaking findings.”
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“For the first time we can measure musical properties in recordings on a large scale,” he said. “We can actually go beyond what music experts tell us, or what we know ourselves about them, by looking directly into the songs, measuring their makeup, and understanding how they have changed.”
Although pop music has evolved continuously, its growth was most rapid during three stylistic revolutions around 1964, 1983 and 1991, the study states. 1991, which is largely considered part of Hip Hop’s Golden Era, is the most prominent time period of the three.
The Evolution of Popular Music Study is as follows:
