WHAT MAKES A HIT SINGLE?
Patterns and variations that everyone likes
Of the millions of tunes and songs that have been written, a few are destined to grab the attention of a whole generation. In modern culture, the big hits tend to belong to a particular type of popular music – songs performed most often by attractive singers, and usually about love or relationships. But every era has had its own form of pop music. Some music now regarded as ‘classical’ would have been the people’s music of its day, and societies have always had favourite folk songs as an important part of their culture.
Are there any rules to say what will make a tune a hit? Recording companies would love to know the answer to this question. In a way, they have already answered part of it. Hence the phenomenon of manufacturing pop groups rather than allowing them to form by chance.
But, setting aside the obvious attractions of sex symbols or topical words, what else are the essentials for giving a tune mass appeal?
Harmonies and melodies that fit our understanding of notes in a scale are clearly one essential, and these are discussed in Chapter 14. But there are other elements to do with numbers and patterns that are arguably even more basic.
Everyone’s got rhythm
What is it about a drumbeat that makes it so important in popular music? There is one obvious explanation. Built into us we have our own thumping drum, in the form of a heart. Typically it beats seventy times in a minute. Amid the sloshing and muffled sounds that we were all exposed to in the womb, one dominant sound would have been the beat of our mother’s heart. So it would be surprising if in later life the beat of a heavy drum didn’t have all sorts of associations with security and the world around us.
In popular songs it is common for the heavy drumbeat to occur at roughly the same rate as a heartbeat. That beat will vary considerably from song to song, just as a heart varies from slow to fast. Fast drums are associated with excitement or youth (sometimes both), where the heart also beats faster. A fast drumbeat of, say, 110-120 per minute usually creates a feelgood, sometimes even a high-adrenaline, mood, and that rate is typical of a Girls Aloud or Status Quo song, for example.
Music doesn’t just work in single beats, however. In most tunes, the underlying rhythm involves a loud beat followed by one or more quieter beats.
The simplest such rhythm is the march. The British Army of old loved to march while whistling tunes with a two-beat rhythm like ‘The British Grenadiers’ or ‘Colonel Bogey’ (the latter most famous as the theme to the film Bridge on the River Kwai). Whistle one of these tunes and the simple left-right-left-right rhythm is obvious.
Almost as common is a three -beat. Once again, this is associated with foot movement, though in the more leisurely form of a waltz. Again, the ‘triangular’ nature of waltz tunes becomes obvious pretty quickly if you hum to yourself a tune such as ‘The Blue Danube’, or the song ‘Close Every Door to Me’ from the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat:
|
Close |
Ev’ |
ry |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
|
door |
to |
me |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
|
Hide |
all |
the |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
|
world |
from |
me |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
…and so on.
The most common beat in popular music is based on the number four, whether it is the beats in rock and roll or the rhythm of a quickstep.
The Beatles were fond of counting-in their songs with ‘One, two, three, four’ before the opening chord. Four beats are really two lots of two, of course, and in rock and roll it is normal for the basic drum to beat on every second note.
Although tunes do occasionally come in fives – there is a well-known jazz piece by Dave Brubeck called ‘Take Five’ for example – just about every popular tune you think of will be composed of basic rhythms of twos or threes.
Why don’t songs with five beats usually make it to Number 1? Almost certainly it is because of the patterns that our brains are wired to recognise. Investigations into the brain in recent years have established that whatever our mathematical ability, almost all of us are preprogrammed to be able to recognise patterns of one, two or three before we learn any arithmetic. The experiments used by Karen Wynn to test this out received quite a bit of publicity. Babies just a few months old were shown a fluffy doll on a small stage. A screen was then raised in front of the stage. The experimenter had a secret hole through which she could secretly add or remove dolls. When the screen was lowered again, the baby lost interest if there was still just the one doll inside, but paid more attention if a second doll had been added. This demonstrated that a baby knew that one is not the same as two.
Further experiments showed that the baby showed added curiosity if 1 + 1 produced only one toy, since it expected one doll plus one doll to be two dolls.
In fact, using this and other experiments, it was established that most of us already knew 1 + 1= 2, 2-1 = 1, and 2+1 = 3 before we could speak. After 3, however, our instinct becomes less reliable.
In the same way, it is likely that our brains can recognise beats of one, two and three without thinking, so that we are drawn by instinct to these rhythms and their multiples. When listening to rhythm we are subconsciously counting, and for patterns of twos and threes this counting is effortless. That isn’t to say we don’t like rhythms of five, say, but we are less automatically drawn to them. Popular tunes use simple numbers.
The Mozart effect
In 1993, Nature magazine published an article entitled ‘Music and spatial task performance’. It reported that listening to a Mozart piano sonata for ten minutes could improve various problem-solving skills for up to a quarter of an hour afterwards.
The idea that music could make us more intelligent captured the popular imagination, and became known as ‘the Mozart effect’. Today it is common for expecting parents to play Mozart (or reggae or anything else they find inspiring) for the foetus to listen to. The hope is that this will give their child’s brain development a head start. Elderly people often claim that solving puzzles keeps their brain supple. Perhaps certain types of music serve the same purpose.
The Mozart effect on its own is unlikely to be the key to turning everyone into a maths genius. Nevertheless, it is yet another example to add to the centuries-old connections between music and mathematics. It’s worth noting that there is plenty of evidence that Mozart himself, like many musicians, had a keen interest in numbers. For example, in the margin of one of his fugues he scribbled calculations relating to his chances of winning a lottery.
Why even numbers are sexier than odd numbers
If you’ve ever run a stick along a fence, you’ll be familiar with the regular ‘ra-ta-ta-ta’ noise that it produces. But if some of the fence posts are missing, it’s possible to detect some well-known rhythms. For example, if you remove posts 2, 3, 6 and 8 from an eight-post fence (not that you are being encouraged to vandalise, you understand) the fence ends up like this:
Run a stick along it at an even speed, and you should hear the rhythm of ‘MAN … u-NI-TED’ or ‘NOR-thern IRE-LAND’ exactly the way that football crowds chant it This pattern is unique – no other removal of posts quite fits. Interestingly the same rhythm has completely different meaning in other contexts. 1 x x 4 5 x 7 x is also the basic rhythm of a tango.
You only have to change the tango subtly to get something very different 1 x x 4 x 6 x 8 is the rhythm behind the theme to The Simpsons.
You can reproduce the opening sequence of that theme by removing posts from a 32-post fence. It goes 1 x x 4 x 6 x 8 9 x x 12 x 14 x 16 17 18 19 20 x x x x x 26 27 28 29 30 x x
In this Simpson rhythm, notice how there are more even numbers than odd numbers. Rhythms with lots of even numbers tend to be funky, jazzy or Latin influenced. In other words even numbers are often sexier than odd numbers.
One of the secrets of popular patterns, especially songs, is their predictability. The regular beat, the familiar chords and the formulaic pattern of verse, chorus, verse, chorus mean that the mind is not too challenged, and listening is easy. By the way, this applies just as much to hymns and many classical tunes as it does to pop music. The great composers like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky all followed well-understood rules about the structure of a symphony.
However, unless the aim is to enter a trancelike state, nobody likes music to be too repetitive. Music that is totally predictable soon becomes boring because it doesn’t require us to think.
There is more than one way to create patterns within the acceptable rules, and talented musicians make a name for them -selves by both challenging the boundaries and yet still staying within the rules.
Mozart was famous for this. Musicians think of Mozart as a genius for his ability to produce music that is easy to listen to yet full of clever surprises at the same time. Mozart was playing with us, exploring some of the alternative patterns and sequences that are possible within music.
It is difficult to appreciate Mozart’s approach without listening to some music, but something similar can be demonstrated with a little nonmusical experiment.
Here is a question about a simple pattern: If ABC goes to ABD, what would you say XYZ goes to? Think about your answer before reading on.
Did you come up with XYA? If you did, you are in agreement with at least 80 per cent of the population. XYA fits a familiar pattern. What comes after Z? A does, because it starts the cycle again. This is a bit like a composer finishing a tune with a solid, comfortable major chord.
But XYA is not the only answer. There are many other possible patterns, depending on the rule for how to choose the symbol that comes after Z. For example, on a computer spreadsheet, the column after Z is AA. This makes XYA A a possible answer. Maybe, though, the rule is that numbers follow letters, which leads to XY1. Or perhaps nothing comes after Z, which means the answer is XY. What other possibilities can you come up with?
Some of the possible answers may strike you as pretty, while others may seem unsatisfying. This sense of a pattern feeling ‘pretty’ or ‘satisfying’ is similar to the effect that different endings to a musical piece might create.
What would a Mozartian answer be? Perhaps it would be WYZ. WYZ is an imaginative answer to the original puzzle. If Z can’t go outwards, then X must go inwards. It is clever and symmetrical, and yet few people think of it. Just the sort of effect that Mozart liked to create, in fact. Maybe you can think of popular artists of today who achieve the same sort of thing.
Will they ever run out of tunes?
Hundreds of new songs are published every week, but how many more new tunes can there be? The supply of tunes in Western music is limited by the number of permutations of the twelve-note scale. It is limited further by the fact that a large proportion of the possible sequences of notes don’t sound good, and are inappropriate for popular tunes in our current culture.
However, even if we are limited to only a certain combination of notes that go together well to make a tune, the scope for variety is still enormous. Denys Parsons, a researcher, discovered that it was possible to identify melodies by noting whether each successive note was higher (U for up), lower (D for down) or the same (R for repeat) relative to its predecessor. Take the tune for ‘Happy Birthday’, for example. The second note is the same as the first (R) the third goes up (U) the fourth goes down (D).
In fact the tune goes: R U D U D D R U D U D D R U D… and so on, but there is usually no need to go beyond fifteen letters in the sequence. That pattern of Rs, Us and Ds is unique to ‘Happy Birthday’ among all popular tunes. In fact, this should not be too surprising. There are 315, about 14 million, different ways of mixing R, U (and D in a sequence of fifteen. So it would be possible to produce five hundred tunes per week for more than five hundred years and still come up with new R, U, D patterns in the first fifteen notes. And this is before we add in other variations on top: the notes themselves and the length of time between the notes (the rhythm), will also create new tunes.
On that evidence, the music industry is here to stay.
A critic once said that his idea of hell was music that is totally predictable, or music that is totally unpredictable. He summed up what many of us instinctively know. Almost certainly, for a song or a tune to become a hit it needs to find the right balance. We’ve already said that too little variety makes a tune dull, but too much variety makes a tune impossible to follow. The ultimate in variety would be a tune composed entirely of randomly selected notes.
The predictability of music can actually be measured. By sampling at regular intervals, it is possible to measure the degree of predictability of the successive notes in a tune. If you think of a tune that is just a repetition of the note middle C, every sample would be exactly the same as its predecessor. The correlation in this music would be 100 per cent. In contrast, if you choose each note by rolling a die that is numbered 1 to 88 to represent every note on the piano keyboard, each note will have no predictable connection with its predecessor, so the correlation will be close to zero.
Music with a high level of correlation is known as brown music, while music that is highly random is called white music. This latter is related to the term ‘white noise’, which is the random cracklings that can be heard on a radio when the dial is between stations. The music in between white and brown – predictable but not too predictable – is known as pink music.
In the realm of published music, analysis by Richard Voss and John Clarke in 1975 suggested that all popular tunes fall within the pink band. Tunes by minimalist composers such as Philip Glass would presumably rate at the very brown end of pink. Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells would be slightly pinker but still on the brown side. The sound of an orchestra tuning up would be at the white end of pink. But it seems that the most popular music – from Ella Fitzgerald to Michael Jackson – sits firmly in the middle of the pink zone.
So could there be a mathematical formula for producing pop songs? Maybe. If so it would take the idea of manufactured groups to another even more chilling level.