James Taylor's "Country Roads", UB40's "Red, Red Wine" and The Beatles' "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" researchers wanted to find out why pop songs make people fun. The result: Choosing the chord progression does not depend on a large number of different tone combinations, but rather on the right combination of tension and surprise effects.
It is often criticized that pop songs always sound somewhat similar. Comedians have repeatedly enjoyed playing with the same four chords a whole series of songs. And yet the compositions are well received by the general public.
To find out why, Vincent Cheung from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, together with colleagues, studied 80,000 chords from almost 750 pop pieces that made it onto the US charts between 1958 and 1991. A computer program calculated how likely certain chord progressions are and determined two values for each chord:
- How expected or surprising is the chord in a musical context?
- How strong does the chord make you guess how the song goes on?
Then the researchers played passages from the pop songs to one of almost 40 subjects. However, they falsified the song snippets so that the songs were no longer recognizable. The study participants only heard the chord progression, underpinned by a standardized drum beat. The chords were all the same length.
Play with the expectations of the listener
The subjects had to state when listening to each chord, how pleasant they felt this. Next, the researchers compared the listening information with the previously calculated values for each chord. This allowed them to determine in which musical context a chord was perceived as particularly pleasant.
more on the subject
Accordingly, it sounds particularly pleasant for the listener when an accordable chord follows a chord progression which leaves the further progression of the piece open. After chords that suggest a certain subsequent tone, an unexpected chord sounds particularly pleasant, write the researchers in the journal "Current Biology".
Investigations of the study participants in the magnetic resonance tomography underpinned the result: The nucleus accumbens in the brains of the subjects, in which feelings of happiness arise responded not as expected per se on the listening pleasure, but only when the listener was particularly curious to see what happens next.
Decisive in which musical situation the listener is surprised
"It's fascinating that people enjoy a piece of music just by the way the chords are arranged in the music over time," Cheung said. People seem to find songs that are pleasant, achieving a good balance between knowing what will happen next and surprise with something unexpected.
So far, it has been assumed that music enjoyment arises, for example, when the listener unexpectedly perceives a good-sounding point. "We have shown that this is not true," said Cheungs colleague Stefan Koelsch, who led the study. It was crucial in what kind of musical situation the listener was surprised by a sequence of notes.
According to the researchers, the results of the study could help to teach music programs to compose.