A Comparative Analysis of Melodic Rhythm in Two Corpora of American Popular Music

This paper compares two corpora of melodies drawn from pre-millennial and post-millennial American popular music, and identifies several notable di↵erences in their use of rhythm. The pre-millennial corpus contains 80 melodies written between 1957–1997 (Tan, Lustig, and Temperley 2018), while the post-millennial corpus (compiled for this study) consists of 24 songs popular between 2015–2019. For both corpora, we analyzed 1) the distribution of note onsets within a measure; 2) the most-frequent four-note rhythms; and 3) the density of note onsets within measures. Our analyses indicated that the post-millennial melodies distribute notes more evenly throughout their measures, show a greater diversity of rhythms, and use greater note-onset density. However, we also found that individual songs re-used rhythmic cells with more internal consistency in the post-millennial dataset. We then analyze Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” a 2019 song (not included in the original analysis) that features many characteristics typical of our post-millennial corpus. We subject many of these features to a computationally-aided close reading, showing how these parameters can be used to support the song’s formal and expressive designs.