Music Sciences

This guy plays an electric fan like an electric guitar

The evolution of music is a swinging pendulum - new things develop in response and in resistance to the old things. The evolution of music is a swinging pendulum - new things develop in response and in resistance to the old things. Nirvana's grunge rock is anti- the likes of flashy arena rock like Queen and Guns N' Roses.

This is a common theme in the arts in general, but now there's some interesting data to articulate this pattern in the music world. (eight million musical albums 1956 - 2015, via Discogs)

And in other music-oriented news - 765 million online music plays, streamed from Spotify in 2016, by 1 million people from 51 countries:

• people of every culture listen to more relaxing music late at night and more energetic music during daytime business hours
• people were more likely to listen to less intense music as they got older
• people in the West tend to play more arousing music, while those in Asia play more relaxing music
• in the Southern Hemisphere, women chose music with higher intensity than men
• in the Northern Hemisphere, women listen to music with lower intensity, particularly in the evening

-phys.org

Notes:
Peter Klimek et al, Fashion and art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition: quantitative evidence from music styles, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2019). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2018.0731


Minsu Park et al. Global music streaming data reveal diurnal and seasonal patterns of affective preference, Nature Human Behaviour (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0508-z

Dear Phishbait

Went fishing in my spambox the other day and thought I should save this, for posterity:

Greetings,

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Best Regards
Captain Patrick Williams

Post Script:
After a quick search, it looks like there's all kinds of iterations of this. Busy guy.

Musical Memetics

Genetic Data Tools Reveal How Pop Music Evolved In The US
The Physics arXiv Blog, 2015. link
Source document:
The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010
arxiv.org, 2015. link

I was into this article anyway, because it puts art and science together. Perhaps predictable for some - rap eventually takes over, dance music peaked in the 90's, country is NOT making a comeback (depends how they classify this, is there such a thing as 'new' country?).

But at the end, memetics rears its multi-headed head. Because the authors of this study used genetics-data analysis tools to do all this. Listen to all this memetalk:

"Musicians copy, repeat and modify song styles they like, this leads to a clear pattern of evolution over time. So it should come as no surprise that techniques developed for the analysis of genetic data should work on music data as well. “The selective forces acting upon new songs are at least partly captured by their rise and fall through the ranks of the charts,” they say."

Catch Em All

There's a lot about fake news and viral memes lately. That is exciting over here, because it's been a central theme at Network Address forever.

But wait...as I search the interwebs for a good image to go with this post, I am hit with an opportune eureka moment.

Viruses, memetic infection, etc., I'm looking for a picture of a kid getting vaccinated, or just jabbed with a needle. I knew I would have to contend with tempting distractions from both pro- and anti- vaccination data-bowels (just came up w that one, aka shit-spewing websites). And so, just one, I click on this chart which lists the characteristics of folks who do not vaccinate their kids. And, despite what you would think (unless everyone already knows this), those people tend to be wealthy and educated. I only point this out because it seems counter-intuitive that educated people would do something kinda stupid, like neglect the benefits of lifesaving medical treatment in lieu of the statistically benign chance of getting a totally pathologically-unknown condition of autism.

Anyway, the point is that the whole vaccines-thing is a meme, for sure, and memes are powerful, and they can even kill you. (Dan Dennett so eloquently points out in his talk about Dangerous Memes.) This meme has been spreading among a particular segment of the population. What is it that makes one person susceptible to one meme? How did this thing become a thing? Turns out there are some things happening like this. I want to know about how anti-vaccines became a thing, but in the meantime, we have this --

Researchers test 'social contagion' in laboratory setting

Apr 2017, phys.org

The results don't sound as interesting as the title, but I guess we should be happy nonetheless that these experiments are being done in a lab setting, instead of just observing any available social media data...

***

And here we have a good look at the effects of a viral campaign, what makes them work or not work; they're looking at the ALS ice bucket challenge, you remember that I'm sure --

Viral charity campaigns have a psychological 'recipe' and all-too-brief lifespan
Feb 2017, phys.org

This is just a clip, there's a better explanation in the article:
"Just as a flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, so a rapid social consensus spike reaches an equally rapid saturation point.

"Once the social tipping point of a campaign has passed, momentum can decay quickly and the purpose can get diluted. Once the ALS campaign had reached peak virality, many people were just pouring cold water over their heads without necessarily referencing the charity."
-Dr Sander van der Linden, from Cambridge's Department of Psychology

image source: link