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Introduction

What is pop music? The definition of pop music is deliberately flexible. It accommodates the fact that the specific music identified as pop is continually changing. At any particular point in time, it may be most straightforward to identify pop music as that which is successful on the pop music charts. For the past 50 years, the most successful musical styles on the pop charts have continually changed and evolved.

However, there are some consistent patterns in what we know as pop music.

Pop Vs. Popular Music

It is tempting to confuse pop music with popular music. The New Grove Dictionary Of Music and Musicians, the musicologist's ultimate reference resource, identifies popular music as the music since industrialization in the 1800's that is most in line with the tastes and interests of the urban middle class. This would include a vast range of music from vaudeville and minstrel shows to heavy metal. Pop music, as a phrase with the shortened first word, has primarily come into usage to describe the music that evolved out of the rock and roll revolution of the mid-1950s and continues on a definable path today.

Music Accessible To the Widest Audience

Since the mid-1950s pop music has usually been identified as the music and the musical styles that are accessible to the broadest audience. This means the music that sells the most copies draws the largest concert audiences and is played most often on the radio.

Most recently, it also includes the music that is most often streamed digitally and provides the soundtrack for the most popular music videos. After Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" hit #1 on music charts in 1955 the most popular music became the records influenced by rock 'n roll instead of the songs and light standards that had dominated TV's Your Hit Parade weekly countdown show.

Since 1955 the music that appeals to the broadest audience, or pop music, has been dominated by sounds that are still rooted in the fundamental elements of rock 'n roll.

Pop Music and Song Structure

One of the most consistent elements of pop music since the 1950's is the pop song. Pop music is not usually written, performed and recorded as a symphony, suite, or concerto. The basic form of pop music is the song and usually a song consisting of verses and a repeated chorus. Most often the songs are between 2 1/2 minutes and 5 1/2 minutes in length. There have been notable exceptions. The Beatles' " Hey Jude" was an epic seven minutes in length. However, in many cases, if the song is abnormally long, an edited version is released for radio airplay such as in the case of Don McLean's "American Pie." It was edited down from its original 8 1/2 minutes long recording to a version just over four minutes for radio airplay. On the other end of the spectrum, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some hit songs clocked in under two minutes in length.

The Pop Music Melting Pot

Like other art forms that aim to attract a mass audience (movies, television, Broadway shows), pop music has been and continues to be a melting pot that borrows and assimilates elements and ideas from a wide range of musical styles.

Rock, R&B, country, disco, punk, and hip-hop are all specific genres of music that have influenced and been incorporated into pop music in various ways over the past six decades. In the past decade, Latin music and other international forms including reggae have played a more prominent role in pop music than in the past.

Pop Music Today

Today's pop music bears significant influences from the development of recording technology. Electronic music played and recorded digitally permeates most of today's top-selling pop music. However, in a shift from the mainstream, Adele's "Someone Like You" from 2011 became the first song featuring only piano and vocals to reach #1 on the US pop chart. In 2014, with her album , Taylor Swift became the most prominent country music performer ever to shift to recording an album that is entirely pop music.

Hip-hop continues to play a significant role in mainstream pop music with Drake emerging as one of the top pop artists of 2016. Although historically American and British artists have dominated pop music, other countries such as Canada, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand are increasingly influential on the international pop music scene.

Western-style pop music is a primary reference point for the development of enormous pop music markets in Korea and Japan. The performers are indigenous, but the sounds are primarily imported from the U.S. and other countries that support Western-style music. K-Pop, the style that has evolved in South Korea is dominated by girl groups and boy bands. In 2012, "Gangnam Style," by the Korean artist Psy, became one of the biggest worldwide hit songs of all time. The music video has racked up more than three billion views on YouTube.

Pop Music Video

Short films of recording artists performing hit songs have existed as a promotional tool since at least the 1950s. Tony Bennett lays claim to creating the first music video with a clip showing him walking in Hyde Park, London while his song "Stranger in Paradise" plays on the soundtrack. Major recording artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan created film clips to accompany their songs in the 1960s.

The industry of music video received a huge boost in 1981 with the launch of the cable television channel MTV. It was dedicated 24 hours a day to showing and building programming around music videos. The channel eventually slowed their broadcast of music videos, but the creation of the short film clips became a permanent part of the pop music industry.

Today, it is rare for a hit song to climb charts without an accompanying music video. In fact, the number of times a music video is viewed is counted as another indicator of the popularity of a song when its national ranking is determined. Many artists also release what are known as lyric videos for their songs. These are film clips that focus on the song lyrics and show them while the song plays on the video soundtrack.

Pure Pop and Power Pop

Although pop music continues to be a melting pot of styles, there is a genre of pop music that claims to be pop music in its purest form. This music, usually called pure pop or power pop, typically consists of relatively brief (not over 3 1/2 minutes) songs played on the standard electric guitar, bass and drums with vocals that have a very strong catchy chorus, or hook.

Among the top pure pop or power pop performers of the past are the Raspberries, Cheap Trick and the Memphis group Big Star. The Knack's #1 smash hit "My Sharona" is often considered the biggest power pop chart hit. In recent years groups like Jimmy Eat World, Fountains of Wayne, and Weezer are the heirs to the sound of classic power pop performers.

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What is pop music? The definition of pop music is deliberately flexible. It accommodates the fact that the specific music identified as pop is continually changing. At any particular point in time, it may be most straightforward to identify pop music as that which is successful on the pop music charts.

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I'm a big fan of music, and use it a lot when working, but I had no idea about how it really affects our brains and bodies. Since music is such a big part of our lives, I thought it would be interesting and useful to have a look at some of the ways we react to it without even realizing.

"Without music, life would be a mistake" - Friedrich Nietzsche

Of course, music affects many different areas of the brain, as you can see in the image below, so we're only scratching the surface with this post, but let's jump in.

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1. Happy/sad music affects how we see neutral faces:

We can usually pick if a piece of music is particularly happy or sad, but this isn't just a subjective idea that comes from how it makes us feel. In fact, our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music.

Even short pieces of happy or sad music can affect us. One study showed that after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard. This also happened with other facial expressions, but was most notable for those that were close to neutral.

Something else that's really interesting about how our emotions are affected by music

is that there are two kind of emotions related to music: perceived emotions and felt emotions.

This means that sometimes we can understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which explains why some of us find listening to sad music enjoyable, rather than depressing.

Unlike in real life situations, we don't feel any real threat or danger when listening to music, so we can perceive the related emotions without truly feeling them-almost like vicarious emotions.

2. Ambient noise can improve creativity

We all like to pump up the tunes when we're powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option.

It turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn't put us off the way high levels of noise do.

The way this works is that moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. In other words, when we struggle (just enough) to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.

In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we're overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.

This is very similar to how temperature and lighting can affect our productivity, where paradoxically a slightly more crowded place can be beneficial.

3. Our music choices can predict our personality

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Take this one with a grain of salt, because it's only been tested on young adults (that I know of), but it's still really interesting.

In a study of couples who spent time getting to know each other, looking at each other's top ten favorite songs actually provided fairly reliable predictions as to the listener's personality traits.

The study used five personality traits for the test: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Interestingly, some traits were more accurately predicted based on the person's listening habits than others. For instance, openness to experience, extraversion and emotional stability were the easiest to guess correctly. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, wasn't obvious based on musical taste.

Here is also a break-down of how the different genres correspond to our personality, according to a study conducted at Heriot-Watt University:

To break it down, here is the connection they have found:

Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease

Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing and at ease

Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert and at ease

Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing

Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle

Country and western fans are hardworking and outgoing

Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing, gentle and at ease

Dance fans are creative and outgoing but not gentle

Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not gentle

Bollywood fans are creative and outgoing

Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease

Chart pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing and gentle, but are not creative and not at ease

Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease

Of course, generalizing based on this study is very hard. However looking at the science of introverts and extroverts, there is some clear overlap.

4. Music can significantly distract us while driving (contrary to common belief)

Another study done on teenagers and young adults focused on how their driving is affected by music.

Drivers were tested while listening to their own choice of music, silence or "safe" music choices provided by the researchers. Of course, their own music was preferred, but it also proved to be more distracting: drivers made more mistakes and drove more aggressively when listening to their own choice of music.

Even more surprising: music provided by the researchers proved to be more beneficial than no music at all. It seems that unfamiliar, or uninteresting, music is best for safe driving.

5. Music training can significantly improve our motor and reasoning skills

We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it's actually useful in more ways than we might expect. One study showed that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn't learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.

They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information, such as identifying relationships, similarities and differences between shapes and patterns.

These two areas in particular are quite removed from musical training as we imagine it, so it's fascinating to see how learning to play an instrument can help kids develop such a wide variety of important skills.

Similar research shows this correlation for exercise and motor skills in the same way, which is also fascinating.

6. Classical music can improve visual attention

It's not just kids that can benefit from musical training or exposure. Stroke patients in one small study showed improved visual attention while listening to classical music.

The study also tried white noise and silence to compare the results, and found that, like the driving study mentioned earlier, silence resulted in the worst scores.

Because this study was so small, the conclusions need to be explored further for validation, but I find it really interesting how music and noise can affect our other senses and abilities-in this case, vision.

7. One-sided phone calls are more distracting than normal conversations

Another study focused on noise, rather than music, showed that when it comes to being distracted by the conversations of others, phone calls where we can only hear one side of the conversation are the worst offenders.

After a survey showed that up to 82% of people find overhearing cellphone conversations annoying, Veronica Galván, a cognitive psychologist at the University of San Diego, decided to study why these are such a pain.

In the study, participants completed word puzzles while one half of them overheard one side of a mundane phone conversation in the background. The other half of the volunteers heard the entire conversation as it took place between two people in the room.

Those who heard the one-sided phone conversation found it more distracting than those who heard both people speaking. They also remembered more of the conversation, showing that it had grabbed their attention more than those who heard both sides and didn't remember as much of the discussion.

The unpredictability of a one-sided conversation seems to be the cause of it grabbing our attention more. Hearing both sides of a conversation, on the other hand, gives us more context which makes it easier to tune out the distraction.

Then again, as we've explored before, getting distracted is often not such a bad things for various reasons.

8. Music helps us exercise

Back to music again, and we can see that just like silence doesn't help us to be more creative or better drivers, it's not much use when we're exercising, either.

Research on the effects of music during exercise has been done for years. In 1911, an American researcher, Leonard Ayres, found that cyclists pedaled faster while listening to music than they did in silence.

This happens because listening to music can drown out our brain's cries of fatigue. As our body realizes we're tired and wants to stop exercising, it sends signals to the brain to stop for a break. Listening to music competes for our brain's attention, and can help us to override those signals of fatigue, though this is mostly beneficial for low- and moderate-intensity exercise. During high-intensity exercise, music isn't as powerful at pulling our brain's attention away from the pain of the workout.

Not only can we push through the pain to exercise longer and harder when we listen to music, but it can actually help us to use our energy more efficiently. A 2012 study showed that cyclists who listened to music required 7% less oxygen to do the same work as those who cycled in silence.

Some recent research has shown that there's a ceiling effect on music at around 145 bpm, where anything higher doesn't seem to add much motivation, so keep that in mind when choosing your workout playlist. Here is how this breaks down for different genres:

Now if we team up these different "tempos" with the actual work-out we're doing, we can be in much better sync and find the right beat for our exercise. If you match up the above with the graphic below it should be super easy to get into a good groove:

So in the same way that exercising makes us happier, it's not surprising that music adds significantly to our work-out success.

What have you noticed about how music affects you? Let us know in the comments.

Image credits: Suites Culturelles, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Ali eminov, PaceDJ

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8 Amazing, Little-Known Ways Music Affects the Brain

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Learn how music affects many different areas of the brain and how it changes some of the ways that we react to things without us even realizing it: