Music is getting bleaker, researchers say. For the last 50 years, the optimistic notes in the compositions are 10% less.
Peter Dodds (Peter Dodds) and Christopher Danforth (Christopher Danforth), who are not musicians, but applied mathematicians, investigated the level of happiness through the songs of the last decades. The researchers examined more than 230,000 popular songs, as well as entries from more than 2.5 million blogs. They were interested in texts with words that have an emotional color.
During the first stage of their work, they defined 1000 words that characterize the “level of happiness” / from 1 – unhappy, to 9 – ecstatic/. Then they started looking for these words in the songs.
As it turned out, since 1960 the songs have become 10% sadder. A significant drop in the level of joy in musical compositions was observed from 1961 to 1980, when hard rock, heavy metal and punk rock came to the fore. Earlier, the word “love” was heard more often on the radio, but during this period, “pain” and “hate” began to prevail.
As for the blog entries, they have become more optimistic since 2005. The average score is almost the same for men and women /respectively-5.89 and 5.91/. Dissatisfaction in blogs is primarily expressed by teenagers, and people aged 45 to 60 are the most positive in the blogosphere.
It’s only natural that moods on blogs are volatile. The main factor for this is the events in society. So, for example, the level of happiness is raised during the holidays. Up to 6.3 it grew after the election of Barack Obama as president of the USA. Michael Jackson’s death, however, knocked it down to 5.7.
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