[UPDATED] Holy crapola. [UPDATED]

First order of business: watch this video.

Now. If your mind is not blown, either you're much more intelligent than I, or you're just plain brain-dead. This is absolutely incredible, and I wonder what it says about culture and humankind.

If nothing else, we're apparently consistent as a species. Really quite eye-opening as to the base similarity of music and music tastes... even across "genres".

Obviously all of these songs are different in lyrics, pacing, and parts of the music that aren't the base cord progression, but it's still incredibly interesting to me that they all share a common chord progression... by my count, that's 39 songs with the same progression.

I feel like there are a lot of sociological and psychological implications to this, but I don't really feel like writing a dissertation on that right now, so I'll leave it alone. If you use it for a thesis or something though, give me credit!

Now, they're not the first guys to point this out... check out Rob Paravonian here. He's got another bunch of songs with the same progression (I think).

Very interesting.

[UPDATE]


Asmodeus, here.  I had been planning to update this post with my thoughts for a while, but have been busy.

It was a delight to watch the video otherguy posted, mainly because it confirmed my already held belief that pop music is--by and large--the same thing, repackaged over and over.  An adage I heard from a music major on my campus with regards to this video is as follows: "In Jazz, you'll play a thousand chords for four people.  In mainstream music, they play four chords for a million."

I had read in an APA study, which I have since been unfortunately unable to locate, that people with higher degrees of intelligence are drawn to more complex music, as well as the inverse.  Whilst I cannot say for certain that this is true, I do notice an unfortunate number of people who think that reggaeton is the best thing since sliced bread.  It could be that some (most) people lack the musical background necessary to appreciate anything that has more than four chords, or a simple repetitive beat.  I also believe most people "hear" music rather than actually "listen" to it.

There are some mainstream artists I don't mind listening to, but this is because they usually deviate from the trite four chords, and major scales.  Muse, for example, often plays in Harmonic minor, and even dorian mode.

Studies on music preference I have found to be inconsistent.  Some say that the death metal I listen to will lead me to develop an aggressive personality, or cause me to be prone to violent outbursts.  Other studies say that since death metal is my preferred genre, rather than depressing or aggravating me or making me violent, it will actually have the opposite effect.  It would be interesting to see some hard science on why people are drawn to certain music, and particularly why bullshit like reggaeton is so popular.  Is it sociological?

It could be that the reason we see the same 4 chords in all the popular music is simply because of marketing.  That is what the record companies produce, and people are gullible enough to keep eating it.

If anyone has anything to say, or has seen some hard science on musical taste/preference or music preference related to intelligence, leave it in the comments!

I leave you now with a decent study on music and the brain: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Music_Leutwyler_01.html