In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. To rectify this, we investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music information retrieval and text-mining tools, ...

Computers are often used in performance of popular music, but most often in very restricted ways, such as keyboard synthesizers where musicians are in complete control, or pre-recorded or sequenced music where musicians follow the computer’s drums or click track. An interesting and yet little-explored possibility is the computer as highly autonomous performer of popular music, capable of joinin...

hen I began thinking about writing, collecting, and commissioning essays about music criticism, I wondered whether I might feel like Charlie Brown in Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown! When he puts a single ornament on the lonesome, fragile Christmas tree he finds, it falls over. Charlie Brown throws his hands up in the air and says, “Augh! I’ve killed it!” I wondered if making rock criticism an a...

There is no simple answer to the question o f the relationship between folk and popular music. If we discuss folk and popular music from the point o f view o f the active participants in the musical activities, and especially if we analyse the ways of music use in the particular life contexts of individuals and groups of people, it becomes clear that almost all the characteristics of the old fo...

This paper provides an account of a range of activities included in the Bachelor of Popular Music (BPM) program that are intended to enhance the creative skills of popular musicians. These processes are largely a reflection of learning practices that are normal in the practice of popular music in the broader community where self-assessment, peer feedback and self-directed study are common. Popu...

This paper describes the design policy and specifications of the RWC Music Database, a music database (DB) that is available to researchers for common use and research purposes. Various commonly available DBs have been built in other research fields and have made a significant contribution to the research in those fields. The field of musical information processing, however, has lacked a common...