the voice of the soloists of musical groups is losing strengthcompared to previous decades, a new study shows.
Scientists from the University of Oldenburg (Germany) analyzed hundreds of recordings of popular songs from 1946 to 2020 to determine the ratio between lead vocals and backing vocals, or LAR.
Their results appear in the JASA Express Letters, published on behalf of the Acoustic Society of America by AIP Publishing, and show that, contrary to expectations, The LAR of popular music has declined over the decades in questionNo. This means that compared to their groups, the soloists are becoming more and more quiet.
The resulting database 300 songs were studied by extracting the voices from the audio mix of each recording. Because most recordings are not available in multiple tracks, a computer program was used to divide each song into four tracks: vocals, bass, percussion (drums) and all other sounds.
“Our analysis showed significant downward trend in LAR from about 5 decibels in 1946 to about 1 decibel in 1975since then, LAR has remained constant,” says Karsten Gerdes, author of the study.
Possible changes in technology
the researchers wanted to determine if LAR values changed over time to improve letter legibility or if changes in music technology intervened. One of the factors can be, for example, the electrical amplification of the instrument, as well as the technology of stereo and multi-track recording. The authors found that changes in music technology appear to be behind the observed LAR decline prior to 1975.
“Another opportunity stylistic evolution of popular music”, says Kai Siedenburg, co-author of the study.
To test this last idea, Researchers conducted a study of gender dependency by looking at Grammy-nominated songs. country, rap, pop, rock and metal genres. Unsurprisingly, country had the highest LAR, followed by rap and pop. LAR was close to zero for rock, negative for metal, and significantly higher for solo artists compared to bands. Sound amplitudes were calculated by subtracting them from the voice maximum. therefore some results were negative.
” guitar riffs are a hallmark of rock and metaland the guitars take on a position comparable to that of a lead vocal,” Siedenburg says.
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