Audio changes with technology and fashion. But the brain's response to a hit in 1965 shares something with its response to a hit in 2023. Resonance is universal.
We analyze 66 years of Billboard hits through the lens of neuroscience. Not just how they sound, but how the brain responds to them.
Explore the research →Audio changes with technology and fashion. But the brain's response to a hit in 1965 shares something with its response to a hit in 2023. Resonance is universal.
Three independent analyses — audio features, brain predictions, and lyrics — all point in the same direction. The sound of popular music shifted toward lower valence. The brain's predicted emotional and prefrontal responses declined in lockstep. And the words themselves lost their most positive vocabulary.
This is not three stories. It is one story, told through three lenses: sound, brain, and language.
Whether the music drives the cultural shift or reflects it remains an open question. But the convergence across independent data sources suggests we are measuring something real — not an artifact of any single method.
Every year-end Hot 100 track from 1960 to 2025. Audio features extracted via Spotify and Deezer APIs.
A deep learning model (Meta Research) that predicts cortical activation from audio. 20,484 vertices, 6 functional regions.
Every finding is an interactive exploration. Real data, real charts, full methodology. Explore, don't just read.