Research

Explorations

Each exploration is a self-contained, interactive analysis. Real data, live charts, full methodology.

Exploration 001 April 2026
The Sadness Shift
How popular music lost its joy. Valence in Billboard hits dropped 28% across six decades, and the shift accelerated after 2010. We trace the trend through loudness wars, mode shifts, and the rise of melancholic production.
6,098 tracks
Dataset
R² = 0.81
Trend fit
p < 10⁻¹⁶
Mann-Kendall
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Exploration 002 April 2026
Six Regions, Sixty Years
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.
5,866 tracks
Dataset
R² = 0.96
Prefrontal decline
20,484 vertices
Brain mesh
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Exploration 003 April 2026
The Death of Love
How the language of Billboard hits shifted from love songs to survival anthems. We analyzed 134,073 words across 5,894 tracks to reveal a collapsing positive/negative ratio and the decline of love as pop music's default vocabulary.
5,894 tracks
Dataset
2.88 → 1.38
Pos/neg ratio
8 themes
Categories
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Exploration 004 April 2026
The Circle of Hits
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.
5,998 tracks
Dataset
p = 10⁻¹⁴
Brain by key
12 keys
Circle of fifths
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Exploration 005 April 2026
The Mathematics of Hits
The hidden laws that govern sixty years of Billboard music. Log-normal distributions, Hurst exponents near 1.0, collapsing entropy, extreme Pareto concentration, and a brain hierarchy that never changes.
5,998 tracks
Dataset
H ≈ 1.0
Hurst exponent
Gini = 0.95
Instrumentalness
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