Explorations

How the brain responds to six decades of hits. Prefrontal and Emotion regions are declining, but hits consistently activate more Auditory and Language areas. We map 20,484 cortical vertices across 30 timesteps to understand what the brain hears in a hit.

The hidden harmony of sixty years of Billboard hits. 5,998 tracks mapped onto the circle of fifths reveal which keys dominate, a 40% drift away from consonance, a minor-key paradox, and brain responses that distinguish all 12 keys with p = 10⁻¹⁴.