Darwin Can Dance! The Evolution Of Pop Music

Why do most people over 40 hate today’s music? Why do your grandparents keep playing their “Malt Shop Memories” CDs? Why does your mom start dancing when she hears Wham! and your dad start nodding his head wildly when he hears Motley Crue? Why does your Uncle never shut up about how Nirvana was the greatest band ever because they "changed everything"? 

As evidenced by their song, "Do The Evolution", Pearl Jam appears to be well-versed in evolutionary theory. But was the advent of grunge the most radical change in the course of modern music history?

Despite the cliché, the song does not remain the same. Just like biological organisms, music evolves - and where there is evolution, there is science. The modern rock band, As I Lay Dying, sings it best: “The Only Constant Is Change”. 

As I Lay Dying is not the kind of music your parents are going to understand. You can hear them now as they cover their ears, “Turn off that racket! My ears are bleeding! You call that singing? He’s just screaming! Back in my day…” and so on.

Elvis Presley is commonly known as “The King of Rock and Roll” for popularizing a groundbreaking style of music in the 1950s that fused rockabilly, country, and rhythm & blues. To this day, he remains the best selling musical artist of all time, having sold in excess of 600 million records.

With this extraordinary popularity, you’d think that his type of music would still be going strong, but one look at today’s pop music chart and you’ll quickly see that there is little on there that resembles the music Elvis brought to the world. On the contrary, there are styles of music on the charts now that Elvis never could have imagined. At the time this article was written, the #1 song on the Top 100 Billboard chart is “See You Again”, which sounds nothing like the music that was popular prior to the 1990s.

While the reason remains debatable, there’s no question that music changes over time. However, our favorite music tends to be what was popular during the most impressionable years of our youth, between ages 12 and 22. Music heard during that window in our lives appears to get hardwired into our brain, forever serving as a powerful stimulus for dopamine release, a neurotransmitter that makes us feel pleasantly satisfied (perhaps "comfortably numb").

In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, evolutionary biologists and computer scientists “come together” to advance our understanding of pop music’s evolution. The researchers analyzed 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100 charts from 1960 to 2010 in order to identify the greatest musical revolution in recent US music history. Was it the famous “British Invasion” led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s?

Was it the rise of disco in the 1970s, led by the Bee Gees, Village People, and KC & the Sunshine Band, or maybe the earth-shattering hard rock of Led Zeppelin?

Could it be the rise of synth-pop and electronic music by the likes of Madonna, Duran Duran, or Howard Jones in the 1980s?

How about the meteoric rise of those late 80s hairbands like Bon Jovi, Poison, or Warrant?

Or maybe it was the gritty angst of grunge that blasted onto the scene with Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden?

None of the above is correct, at least according to the criteria used by the authors of the study, which employed “cutting edge methods from signal processing and text-mining to analyze the musical properties of songs. Their system automatically grouped the thousands of songs by patterns of chord changes and tone allowing researchers to statistically identify trends with an unprecedented degree of consistency.”

The biggest upheaval occurred in 1991, but not with grunge…it was with hip-hop. Starting in the mid-80s, rap and hip-hop began climbing a steady ladder to the mainstream, with the help of artists like Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, Salt-N-Pepa, and LL Cool J. But 1991 was a watershed year with huge breakthroughs for hip-hop artists like N.W.A., Ice Cube, Ice-T, 2Pac, TLC, and Public Enemy. The radical changes in lyrical content and delivery, arrangement, and the diversity of sounds culminated to make hip-hop one of the most innovative changes to music in recent history.

With these powerful tools to analyze how music has evolved over the past 50 years, one has to wonder if it is possible to predict how music might sound in 2065.

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter.

References: 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150506084811.htm

Matthias Mauch, Robert M. Maccallum, Mark Levy, Armand M. Leroi. The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010. Royal Society Open Science, May 2015 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.150081

Salimpoor, V., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music Nature Neuroscience, 14 (2), 257-262 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2726

Might you like a water mite named after you?

It is estimated that nearly 9 million species share the Earth but only 2 million of them have been named. In scientific parlance, organisms are named using binomial nomenclature with the first word referring to the genus and the second word the species (e.g., humans = Homo sapiens). Typically, the scientists who discover the new species get the pleasure of naming it. Often, the species’ name refers to the location where it was found, or it refers to a peculiar trait the organism possesses. Or, it may simply be the music that was playing at the time of the discovery.

Famed singer/actress/dancer Jennifer Lopez provided the inspiration for the name of a newly discovered species of water mite found near Puerto Rico, Litarachna lopezae. Some have speculated that this is due to an uncanny resemblance between their posteriors, but the scientists claim that they were listening to her music while analyzing the mites (nothing like a little “Booty” piping through the lab to stimulate the intellectual rigor that goes into experimental design). But biologist Vladimiar Pesic, who made the discovery, contends, "The reason behind the unusual choice of name for the new species is simple: J Lo's songs and videos kept the team in a continuous good mood when writing the manuscript and watching World Cup Soccer 2014”.

Litarachna lopezae, also known as "L.Lo".
Why the extra “ae” at the end of “lopez”? To make it sound more science-y, of course.

In the scientific world, it is considered an honor to have a species named after you. Think about having your name forever linked to a beautiful flower or a majestic beast that rules the jungle – that would be pretty awesome. But as noted above, not all creatures are pleasant to look at or even possible to look at without a microscope. Some creatures make us sick or even kill us. Who’d want to be named after such a critter?

Well, President Barack Obama was the motivation behind the naming of Paragordius obamai, a newly described parasitic worm. I’m sure there are many people chomping at the bit to crack a joke about this, but the researchers claim that the name stems from the fact that they discovered the worm in Kenya, the native country of Obama’s father. There is also a trapdoor spider, Aptostichus barackobamai, named after our current president, presumably in recognition of his confessed love of Spiderman comics. Well on his way to having the most species named after him than any other president, Barack Obama’s namesake has also been used for a lichen (Caloplaca obamae) and an extinct lizard (Obamadon gracilis). Oh, and who can forget about the “Obamafish” (Etheostoma obama)?

A politician named after a worm. And not just any worm – a parasitic worm. Live bait for any comedian.

The names of other presidents and politicians have been adapted for binomial nomenclature, although surprisingly, no species of newt has been named after Newt Gingrich yet. George W. Bush, along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, all have a species of the Agathidium slime-mold beetle named after them (Agathidium bushi, A. cheneyi, and A. rumsfeldi). Both Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as Thomas Jefferson, have multiple species named after them. Clinton, Gore, and Carter have each been named after a species of Etheostoma (a genus of freshwater fish). And last but not least, George Washington served as the inspiration behind the name of Washingtonia, a genus of palm trees.

Let’s see if you can guess which celebrity is associated with the following species pictured below (answers at the bottom).



One

Two

Three



Four



Five

Six

The answers:

1. Echiniscus madonnae, a microscopic waterbear named after Madonna. These critters are virtually indestructible and have lived forever.

2. Gnathia marleyi, a fish parasite named after Bob Marley that is only found in the Caribbean Sea.

3. Eristalis gatesi, a flower fly named after Bill Gates. Yes, it crashes a lot.

4. Kootenichela deppi, a pre-historic arthropod that reminded the scientist of Edward Scissorhands, so he named it after Johnny Depp. Ironically, the scientist who discovered this many footed creature is named Dr. Legg!

5. Aleiodes gaga, a parasitoid wasp from Thailand named after Lady Gaga.

6. Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, a marsh rabbit named after the founder of Playboy, Hugh Hefner (Playboy bunny, get it?).

So where did we get this system to name all of the life on Earth (a science known as taxonomy)? Some say it formally started with Aristotle's classification scheme as early as 300 BC. First, an organism was divided into the plant or animal group. Second, animals were subdivided into those that had blood and those that did not. Third, animals were further divided into things that walked, flew, or swam. Aristotle's system gets confusing because a duck can do all of these things, but his scheme was good enough to last 2000 years.

In the 1700s, Carl Linnaeus revised this system to include more categories that grouped organisms based on their morphology (body form). He was also the one who perfected the binomial nomenclature with the genus and species names. Written properly, the genus is always capitalized and the species always in lower case, and the entire name should be in italics or underlined. Latin is used because it is a universal and "dead" language, meaning it is no longer in use and therefore immutable. Plus, it sounds very scholarly. The Linnaeus system is so elegant and effective, it is still used today.

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter: @wjsullivan

Hanelt, B., Bolek, M., & Schmidt-Rhaesa, A. (2012). Going Solo: Discovery of the First Parthenogenetic Gordiid (Nematomorpha: Gordiida) PLoS ONE, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034472