3BI: Dark Side of the Moon, Grammys, and music psychology
Hello from Colorado, where I’ve spent the last week skiing, working, and relaxing in the fresh mountain air.
This week’s newsletter focuses on music, starting with the psychology of one of the greatest albums of all time.
The Psychology of Dark Side of the Moon
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, widely regarded as one of the most innovative and successful albums of all time. 50 years from its original release date, it still tracks on Billboard, the longest charting album in its history.
NPR interviewed psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin to dissect the album and its staying power.
One of the most memorable songs from the album is “Time,” which bucks conventional rock song structures to create a disorienting temporal perception:
Right off the bat, they're playing with time. You hear that clop-clop sound, like a heartbeat or a clock ticking. And you think that the higher-pitched one is the downbeat. But as soon as the instruments come in, you realize you're off the beat, and everything's upside down. And your sense of time is distorted.
And then you've got this long intro, and the proper part of the song doesn't start until well after two minutes in, as though they're ignoring the time convention for a rock song.
Popular songs typically follow an ABABCB structure, with an intro — verse — chorus — verse — chorus —bridge — chorus — outro. In pop music, each section tends to follow consistent timing where intros are either four or eight bars long, followed an eight bar verse, then an eight bar chorus, and so on. The two minute, off-beat intro of “Time” signifies the unique structure of the album.
This was intentional to illuminate the meaning of the song:
Roger said about that year and that song that he suddenly realized that life was already happening. The idea that you prepare your whole life for a life that's going to start later - he suddenly realized life wasn't going to start later. It had started. And the idea of time was to grasp the reins and start guiding your own destiny.
The theme of self-reflection is consistent through the album and one aspect of what makes it timeless:
It's impossible to just keep it out there. It gets inside your head.
…
I suppose part of it is that it's now a cultural touchstone. If you're, you know, under 30, it may be that your grandparents heard it and your parents heard it. I think also the art of it is that the songs flow into one another symphonically, and it's just full of little Easter eggs - little things that you can pick up that you hadn't noted were there before. And the lyrics sort of work all together as a whole. That final lyric where the sun is eclipsed by the moon - maybe it's a metaphor. Syd [Barret] was the sun of the band, the brightest spot. And [Roger] Waters was the moon and overtook him.
Listen to or read the full interview at NPR.
How Musicians Communicate Emotion
Levitin has studied the science of music extensively and is the author of This Is Your Brain On Music.
In one study, he worked with collaborators to quantify musical expression and determine what separates an emotional performance from a non-emotional one. They found that the emotional expressiveness of songs played on a piano was driven by how the individual notes were played, whether louder/softer or faster/slower.
Check out the video by clicking the image below:
How the Grammy Awards Change Artists’ Music
The Grammys are the most prestigious awards in music and can have a major impact on a musician’s career. A team of organizational researchers were curious about how that impact affected the music artists make and ran an interesting study to find out.
Using machine learning models, they analyzed the music of the nominees and winners of the four major all-genre Grammy Awards (Album of the Year; Record of the Year; Song of the Year; and Best New Artist), from 1959 to 2018 to determine the genre of each artists’ albums and how they differed before and after the awards.
They found that musical progression differed between artists who won an award and those who were just nominated:
…after winning a Grammy, artists tend to release music that deviates stylistically from their own previous work, as well as from other artists in their genre. Nominees who lose do the opposite—their subsequent albums trend toward the mainstream.
This has interesting implications for how success or simply falling just short of a goal may affect risk-taking:
We think this happens because winning a Grammy grants an artist more leverage to pursue their personal artistic inclinations. Nonwinners, however, might interpret their loss as a negative signal about how their artistic choices deviated from the norm, and thus feel more bound to conventions of their genre.
Read more at Behavioral Scientist.