Beginning in 1950, the group studied the top five songs on the Billboard chart at the time, all the way to 2023. Studying the rhythm and pitch of each batch of songs, the researchers found that the ...

CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. The process of writing a song has always seemed daunting to me. Especially at the Folklife Festival, surrounded by wildly talented musicians ...

The complexity of the melodies of the most popular songs each year in the USA — according to the Billboard year-end singles charts — has decreased since 1950, a study published in Scientific Reports ...

Crafting melodies and instrumentation—often birthed on an acoustic guitar—stands as the initial, integral step in Plummer’s songwriting journey. He shared, “Always the melody and instrumentation first ...

Humans have been banging out rhythms and singing melodies for as long as we’ve been around, from Paleolithic flutists to contemporary K-pop performers. So if you want to make music, the good news is ...

Anastasio says that, in an effort to push compositional boundaries, he writes a lot of his guitar parts on piano ...