The evolution of western pop music, spanning from 1960 to 2010, has been analysed by scientists and the findings make for interesting reading.

A team from Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London studied in excess of 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100. They discovered there were three distinct music revolutions in 1964, 1983 and 1991, and in the process were able to identify the loss of blues chords from the charts, as well as the birth of disco. The study is published in full in the Royal Society Open Science journal.

The team also challenged a commonly held school of thought that contemporary pop music sounds the same: Dr Matthias Mauch, from Queen Mary University of London, commented: “What is really fascinating to see is how diversity has changed – we can measure whether the charts have become more bland. I think that hip-hop saved the charts. Many people claim music is getting worse and worse, and we didn’t really find anything like that. There is not an overall trend for the composition, the musical ingredients of the charts, to become less diverse.”

According to a BBC article “the researchers looked at the different characteristics of music, including harmony, chords changes and timbres (the tonal quality of the music), and then analysed how they changed over time. In the early 1960s, chords called dominant sevenths, found in jazz and blues started to die out. Instead, in 1964 the invasion of British bands – from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones – introduced a radical new rocky sound.”

The research revealed that this was this the first of three stylistic revolutions – periods of extremely rapid change within the charts. New technology, synthesisers, samplers and drum machines, drove a second major shift in music style in 1983. Synthesisers, drum machines and samplers helped bands like the Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and the Eurythmics to transform the sound of chart music.

The third revolution, in 1991, arrived when rap and hip-hop went mainstream. Dr Mauch explained: “The third revolution is the biggest. This is so prominent in our analysis, because we looked at harmony – and rap and hip-hop don’t use a lot of harmony. The emphasis is on speech sounds and rhythm. This was a real revolution: suddenly it was possible that you had a pop song without harmony.”

The researchers say that some musical changes were slower to become embedded within the charts, but still had a big impact. “The minor seventh chords were introduced through funk, soul and disco in the 1970s. That didn’t cause a revolution, but these chords were not present before – and they haven’t gone away since. New songs still heavily use these chords.” said Dr Mauch.

The researchers found that music constantly evolved and changed throughout the 50-year period. However, there was a blip with the introduction of arena rock in the 1980s which meant that for a while music lacked diversity. Dr Mauch explained: “A lot of hair metal and stadium rock, like Bon Jovi and Bruce Spingsteen, came into the charts, and they had a bigger share of the overall charts. But then rap and hip-hop came in. I think that hip-hop saved the charts.”

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