<
https://theconversation.com/how-hyperselection-is-making-modern-life-efficient-pleasant-and-boring-290862>
"It’s difficult to imagine a song like Queen’s 1975
Bohemian Rhapsody topping
the charts today. Almost six minutes long, it moves through several radically
different musical sections and famously ignores the conventional structure of a
pop song. It seems almost designed to break the rules of what a hit single
should be.
Fifty years later, popular music seems to have moved in the opposite direction.
Once artists and producers figure out what makes a commercial hit – from its
length and structure to its rhythm, melody and how quickly it reaches a catchy
hook – songs can be optimised to reproduce them.
This tendency is especially pronounced today because streaming platforms allow
millions of songs to compete for our attention. This creates intense pressure
to stick to formulas that are known to work rather than risk experimenting with
something different. As a result, the musical landscape becomes filled with
songs that sound alike.
This is an example of what my colleagues and I call hyperselection in a new
paper published in the journal
Frontiers in Psychology. This idea refers to
what happens when competition becomes so intense, and we become so adept at
identifying and optimising what succeeds, that we repeatedly select for the
same characteristics while alternatives are eliminated."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
