The Influence of Music

Background:

Music has been part of human societies since the beginning of time as an essential component of cultural heritage. As part of an effort to understand the role music has played in the collective human experience, we have been asked to develop a method to quantify musical evolution. There are many factors that can influence artists when they create a new piece of music, including their innate ingenuity, current social or political events, access to new instruments or tools, or other personal experiences. Our goal is to understand and measure the influence of previously produced music on new music and musical artists.

Some artists can list a dozen or more other artists who they say influenced their own musical work. It has also been suggested that influence can be measured by the degree of similarity between song characteristics, such as structure, rhythm, or lyrics. There are sometimes revolutionary shifts in music, offering new sounds or tempos, such as when a new genre emerges, or there is a reinvention of an existing genre (e.g. classical, pop/rock, jazz, etc.). This can be due to a sequence of small changes, a cooperative effort of artists, a series of influential artists, or a shift within society.

Many songs have similar sounds, and many artists have contributed to major shifts in a musical genre. Sometimes these shifts are due to one artist influencing another. Sometimes it is a change that emerges in response to external events (such as major world events or technological advances). By considering networks of songs and their musical characteristics, we can begin to capture the influence that musical artists have on each other. And, perhaps, we can also gain a better understanding of how music evolves through societies over time.