590429

research-article2015
POM0010.1177/0305735615590429Psychology of MusicHass

Article

Psychology of Music

An exploration of the relationship

2016, Vol. 44(4) 710­–729
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0305735615590429
fame in early 20th-century pom.sagepub.com

American popular music

Richard W. Hass

Abstract
The current study examined the relationship between fame and melodic originality among the
refrains of over 500 early American popular songs. The main goals were to attempt to replicate results
detailed by Simonton (1994), to compare different measures of melodic originality in the context
of information theory, and to utilize hierarchical linear modeling in the analyses. The following
hypotheses were tested: (1) melodic originality varies across historical time; (2) melodic originality
is a positive function of composer age; and (3) fame is a curvilinear function of melodic originality.
Results showed that melodic originality increased from 1916 to 1960—the period covered by the
current corpus—which is consistent with hypothesis 1. Hypothesis 2 was not confirmed, as results
showed a negative relationship between originality and age. The test of hypothesis 3 showed that
a significant amount of the variation in fame could be attributed to a non-linear relationship with
originality, but that the fame–originality relationship is moderated by genre (instrumental v. vocal).
Implications for further studies of the psychomusical contributions to fame are discussed.

Keywords
cognition, creativity, information theory, music analysis, popular music

Researchers interested in studying creative development and achievement in composers often

examine the distribution of high- and low-quality works across composers’ careers. Much of
the research focuses on classical music (Kozbelt, 2005, 2008; Kozbelt & Burger-Pianko, 2007;
Simonton, 1977, 1980a, 1980b, 1989, 1994) and on popular songs from first half of the 20th
century (e.g., Hass & Weisberg, 2009; Hass, Weisberg, & Choi, 2010). While classical music

Department of Psychology, Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Corresponding author:
Richard W. Hass, Department of Psychology, Philadelphia University, 4201 Henry Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19144,
USA.
Email: hassr@philau.edu
Hass 711

offers a larger corpus of work and a richer history (Simonton, 1994), American popular music
published between 1900 and 1960 offers a relatively standardized corpus (cf. Wilder, 1972),
meaning that there should be sufficiently fewer genre-based differences in the latter corpus
(Hass & Weisberg, 2009). Popular music, though sometimes dismissed by critics, is generally
representative of cultural trends (Middleton, 1990), and has been used as a vehicle for under-
standing the relationship between music and emotion and memory (e.g., Krumhansl, 2010;
Schellenberg & Scheve, 2012).
Despite the recent attention given to popular songs by music cognition researchers, less is
known about how songs achieve public recognition. In an effort to add to this recent body of
work on popular music, this article examines the relationship between information-theoretic
measures of melodic originality and fame in the songs from the Great American Songbook.1
The current study synthesizes the two-note transition–probability approach to melodic origi-
nality employed by Simonton (e.g., 1994) with recent interest in information-theoretic meas-
ures such as entropy and point-wise mutual information (e.g., Margulis & Beatty, 2008). Before
describing the current analysis in full, I will first summarize several analyses of melodic origi-
nality in classical music and derive hypotheses. Following that, I will introduce definitions for
entropy and point-wise mutual information used in the article. Finally, the analysis will be pre-
sented and fully discussed.

Melodic originality in classical music

Simonton (cf., 19942) embarked on a decade-long investigation into melodic originality across
themes from a large corpus (> 15,000 themes) of classical instrumental and vocal music
(Barlow & Morgenstern, 1948, 1976). He quantified melodic originality by first tabulating the
two-note transition probabilities (i.e., relative frequencies of bigrams) across the first six notes
of each theme in the corpus. He then assigned each theme an originality score, defined as:


 ∑ 1⩽ i⩽5 P
2< j < 6
( i, j ) 
Originality = 1 −  
 5 
 

with P(i, j) representing the probability of each bigram (represented by relative frequencies),
and dividing the sum by 5 creating an average probability across the five bigrams. Subtracting
the average from 1 yields the complement of the average probability of the bigrams, and thus
represents an “improbability” score, with the desired property of larger numbers signifying
more originality. Simonton’s main justification for this measure was that Martindale and
Uemura (1983) showed that themes that scored higher on Simonton’s originality measure
were also rated as “higher in ‘arousal potential’” (Simonton, 1994: p. 34), by listeners.
Simonton’s (1994) summary also provides a number of interesting results regarding the
relationship between melodic originality and a slew of other variables, most notably composer
age, historical time, and fame of the composition as a whole. According to Simonton, original-
ity should increase to a peak well into composers’ careers, and then dip slightly (see also
Simonton, 1989). Originality also varies substantially across historical time, with Simonton
showing support for a 5th-order polynomial (generally increasing) functional relationship
between the two variables. However, a more recent study (Kozbelt & Meredith, 2010) showed
that a linear increase in melodic originality between 1500 and 1950 is a better fit to the data.
Regardless, originality of Western tonal melodies seems to have increased across its more than
400 year history.
712 Psychology of Music 44(4)

Simonton also showed that the fame of a composition—measured in terms of the number of
citations across an array of music anthologies, concert guides, and music appreciation text-
books—is a backward, inverted J-function of melodic originality (i.e., curvilinear). He con-
cluded that the most famous songs were those that offered a medium amount of melodic
originality. To add more depth, Simonton qualified the fame–originality relationship in a sec-
ond paper (Simonton, 1980b) using a metric called Zeitgeist originality—essentially centering
each song’s repertoire originality score around the yearly mean of originality scores for all
songs contributing during that time period (mainly 5-year blocks). Simonton concluded that
composers begin their careers by matching their styles to the Zeitgeist but, as their careers pro-
gress, they begin to deviate from the Zeitgeist, producing more and more original work relative
to their time-period. In describing this, Simonton laments the early death of Mozart, who may
have gone on to produce even more original works if only he had lived long enough.
Though the sheer volume of analyses performed by Simonton on this 15,000-theme dataset
should not go unrecognized, Simonton’s claims have been recently challenged by studies using
multilevel modeling (a.k.a. hierarchical linear modeling: Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002). In hier-
archical linear modeling (HLM), variance can be partitioned to more precisely test hypotheses
on datasets with observations nested in higher-order units. More specifically, HLM allows for
regression coefficients of some variables to be functions of other, higher-level variables. For
example, Kozbelt and Meredith (2011) constructed a hierarchical model in which melodic orig-
inality (level 1) was nested within composer-level variables (level 2) such as birth year and
compositional style. In doing so, they allowed for variations in the relationships between age
and originality, and originality and fame in different factors of the composer-level variables.
They found that composers with longer careers (level-2 factor) exhibited larger linear increases
in originality (level-1 dependent variable) than less prolific composers (level-2 factor) with
shorter careers. Further analysis by Meredith and Kozbelt (2014) using HLM showed evidence
against the swan-song phenomenon. Thus, further examination of the relationships between
originality and time, and originality and fame using a different corpus are necessary. In addi-
tion, analyses of datasets of this source need to reflect the nested nature of the data, and so
HLM was be employed in appropriate phases of the current study.

The current study

To summarize, melodic originality seems to vary over time and within individual composers’
careers. Originality, defined in terms of an overall corpus, and in terms of specific years may
also predict the fame that a composition earns. Thus, the specific goals of this study were to
attempt to replicate these effects in a corpus of American popular songs composed between
1900 and 1960.
There are a few notable differences between this and prior analyses. First, there is reason to
believe that reference works regarding American popular music sometimes provide biased
views of song quality (for a full discussion see Middleton, 1990). Second, it has been argued
(e.g., Hass, 2011, 2013) that more reliable and valid information about creative impact can be
culled from electronic databases, if they exist. Fortunately, music information researchers have
compiled a freely accessible and dynamic database of citation counts of popular songs (www.
secondhandsongs.com), which served as the sole indicator of fame for this analysis.3 The data-
base specifically tallies the number of different artists that have covered a song, and is curated
by a team of music information-retrieval researchers, for the purpose of this type of analysis.
Count data of this sort also have an advantage over composite data for they allow for
the direct examination of distributions of rare events. Indeed, many works published by
Hass 713

songwriters and composers go unnoticed, meaning that the production of a very famous song
is a rare event (cf., Lotka, 1926). This is interesting because the generating process for rare
events can be approximated with a Poisson distribution (e.g., Ross, 2010) and, thus, Poisson
regression can be applied in the current case to more accurately analyze the relationship
between melodic originality and fame. Indeed, Simonton (2003) hypothesized that a stochastic
combinatorial process governs all creative productivity, and that the probability that a particu-
lar person creates a famous product is Poisson distributed (i.e., immensely good ideas are rare
events). In prior research (e.g., Kozbelt & Meredith, 2011) the fame variable was transformed to
conform to the assumption of normality for a general linear model. Such a transformation is
not applicable to the current dataset because of the presence of zeros. In fact, if fame reflects an
underlying Poisson processes then transforming the data would obscure our understanding of
how and why high fame songs come to exist. So another key aspect of this analysis is that it is
the first of its kind to feature an un-transformed, Poisson-distributed measure of fame.
Also, the current dataset, though composed of only 50 years of music, does have nested
properties. Specifically, songs are nested in composer’s careers and within genres. As described,
Kozbelt and Meredith (2011) showed that the use of HLM might be better than a disaggregated
regression approach to this type of data (see also Meredith & Kozbelt, 2014). The relationships
among originality, composer age, and historical time are likely nested within the genre (vocal or
instrumental) to which a song belongs. Thus, a random intercept model was constructed for
originality to adequately reflect the nesting. However, the fame variable (Poisson distributed)
violates basic HLM assumptions, and requires a generalized HLM. The latter is more complex
than a single-level generalized linear model, but an increase in computing capability over the
last two decades enables good approximation to the quite complicated generalized HLM estima-
tors (e.g., in the R statistical programming environment, see below).
Finally, a secondary aim of this study was a comparison of Simonton’s melodic originality
metrics (repertoire and Zeitgeist) with other some alternative measures. It should be noted that
in his initial analyses, Simonton (1980a, 1980b) defined melodic originality as the sum of the
transition probabilities (reverse-scored), which is just an approximation of a high-order Markov
chain to the sequence of transitions. It is an approximation because accurate Markov chain
calculations of higher order would require conditioning the probability of each transition on
the prior state (Ross, 2010). More importantly, a Markov chain approximation assumes that
each state (in this case, each transition to a new pitch-class) is independent of everything except
the prior state, highly unlikely given the compositional conventions across the western canon,
including a preference for small intervals (Narmour, 1990), and correlation between pitch-
class distributions and the tonal hierarchy (e.g., Huron, 2006; Krumhansl, 1990). Markov
models have been used in music perception to calculate similarity between melodies but only to
quantify the difference between a target melody and several transformations of that same mel-
ody (Schulkind & Davis, 2013).
In light of the possibility that other kinds of probability metrics may be useful in defining
originality, the current analysis introduces three additional metrics related to information the-
ory. First, one can compute the information content, or in this case, the negative base-2 loga-
rithm of the product of the transition probabilities. Recent studies have shown that information
content is directly related to the expectedness of melodic events (e.g., Hansen & Pearce, 2014).
Second, it may be advantageous to examine originality in terms of pitch-classes rather than
bigrams. For example, repetitive melodies contain less information than relatively random mel-
odies in the sense that a person should find it easier to predict what the next note will be while
listening to a repetitive melody (Cohen, 1962). Repetitiveness may be a way in which listeners
gauge originality of a melody, and may contribute to the ultimate fame of a composition. The
714 Psychology of Music 44(4)

method section describes a simple procedure for capturing repetitiveness in terms of the entropy
of each six-note melodic segment. Finally, another information-theoretic metric, point-wise
mutual information (PMI), has emerged as a way to gauge the semantic relatedness of compo-
nents of linguistic bigrams (Recchia & Jones, 2009), and the procedure was adopted here for
gauging how formulaic each six-note segment was, conditioned on the distribution of pitch-
classes in the entire corpus. In the following sections, variables will be defined in more depth,
and the results will be compared with Simonton’s (1994) conclusions, as detailed above.

Method
Songs
A total of 553 songs served as the subjects of analysis. Songs were included based on two inter-
dependent criteria: (1) the song’s inclusion in one of six “fake books” used by performing musi-
cians (see appendix), and (2) the song having been published either as sheet music or via
recording before the year 1960. The latter criterion was chosen because 1960 marks the end of
the period covered in Wilder’s (1972) in-depth analysis of the Great American Songbook. The
1960s also mark the start of a shift in the focus of popular music from bands performing cover
songs to bands writing and performing original material (Wald, 2009). The latter is important
for the validity of using cover counts as the sole indicator of fame.

Fame
The fame variable was defined as total number of entries for each song in the Second Hand
Songs (SHS) database (www.secondhandsongs.com). A separate study on the entire careers of
five of the most eminent composers in this sample (Hass & Weisberg, 2015) revealed that cover
counts from SHS and another database (www.allmusic.com) correlate very highly (r ≈ .71).
Again, one reason to use the counts from the SHS database as the only criterion was motivated
by the shape of the distribution—resembling a Poisson process (see Figure 1)—which is con-
sistent with studies of creativity in science (Simonton, 2003). SHS is also maintained by a team
of music information researchers who constructed it for the purpose of this type of archival
research. Thus, it is a reliable index of how many times a song was covered by another artist,
either in the studio or on a live album. Again, this metric is quite similar to Simonton’s
(e.g., 1994) composite citation index, compiled from several text-based reference sources.

Transition-probability variables
Repertoire and Zeitgeist originality.  In keeping with Simonton’s (1994) latest conventions, reper-
toire originality was computed by first calculating the average probability across the 5 bigrams,
and then subtracting that result from 1. Zeitgeist originality was computed by regressing rep-
ertoire originality on historical time, saving the predicted scores, and calculating the difference
between each repertoire originality score and its predicted score.

Information content.  Repertoire and Zeitgeist originality are essentially probabilities of the union
n
 n 
P
of a particular set of bigrams (i.e.,  U X i =
 i=1  i=1
∑ P ( X i ) , with P(Xi) approximated by the rela-

tive frequency of each bigram across the corpus). As such, one can calculate the joint probabil-
ity of each melody by taking the product of the bigrams. In this corpus, and in the classical
Hass 715

75

Genre
Frequency

50
Instrumental

Vocal

25

0 200 400 600 800

SHS citations

Figure 1.  Histogram of SHS citations for vocal and instrumental songs.

corpus used by Simonton, the relative frequencies of bigrams are small. The product of a num-
ber of small decimal values is an even smaller decimal. A solution is to compute the base-2 loga-
rithm of the joint probability, and then multiply by (–1) to remove the negative sign. The result
is a quantity, based on probability, with the desired property that a large quantity (of informa-
tion content) corresponds with low-probability bigrams. This is nearly equivalent in principle to
Simonton’s repertoire originality metric.

Pitch-class variables
In addition to examining transition-probabilities, the actual distribution of pitch classes was
also tallied. Figure 2 shows that scale degrees 1, 5, and 8 (corresponding to the tonic, median,
and dominant pitches) were most common among songs in the corpus. This is to be expected
given Krumhansl’s (1990) discussion of work by Knopoff and Hutchinson (1983) showing
that this distribution is common in western classical music, and may be evidence of composers’
awareness of the tonal hierarchy. As such, two pitch-class variables were constructed, one that
did not account for this underlying distribution (entropy) and one that did (average PMI).

Entropy.  Shannon’s (1948) equation for entropy can be used to assess the amount of uncer-
tainty in a signal source (see also Cohen, 1962; Margulis & Beatty, 2008). Shannon entropy is
defined as:
M
H =− ∑ P log P
i=1
i 2 i

where Pi refers to the probability of some symbol, i, in a set of M symbols. The base 2 of the loga-
rithm means that uncertainty is measured in bits, or the number of binary digits needed to
encode each symbol. Shannon entropy must be defined across a sample space that sums to 1.
716 Psychology of Music 44(4)

600
Frequency

400

200

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Scale degree

Figure 2.  Distribution of scale degrees among the melodies.

To apply the metric to this analysis, each of the six slots available in the melodic segments were
assigned a probability value of 1/24. An algorithm written in R (see note 1) then scanned each
segment and determined how many times (if at all) a note was repeated. If a note occurred only
once, its posterior probability was increased by 3/24 once, resulting in the probability of 1/6 for
that slot. However, if a note was repeated n times, n × 3/24 was added to the initial 1/24 for the
first slot, while each of the remaining slots with the repeated note remained at 1/24. This
ensured that all of the six note “distributions” would always sum to 1, thus satisfying the sec-
ond Kolmogorov axiom of probability.4
As an example, if a melody consisted of six unique notes, the posterior probability of each
note would be 1/6 (or 1/24 + 3/24). The resulting entropy value is:

 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 
 × log2  +  × log2  +  × log2  +  × log2  
6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 
−1 ×  ≈ 2.585.
 1 1 1 1 
 + 6 × lo g + × log 
6   6 6  
2 2
 

If a melody consisted of five unique notes and one duplicate, the resulting probabilities would
be 7/24, 1/6, 1/6, 1/6, 1/6, and 1/24. Using the entropy equation, the resulting entropy value
for that melody would be roughly 2.433.

Average PMI.  As previously described, PMI is a metric used to gauge the semantic relatedness
between two words or documents (Recchia & Jones, 2009). It is calculated in the following way:
given two tokens (e.g., words or pitch-classes) PMI is the ratio of the joint probability of the two
Hass 717

tokens to the product of the probabilities of the tokens themselves. Thus, the formula for PMI
between two symbols is given by:
P( a,b )
PMI ( a,b ) = log 2
P( a ) P( b )

with a and b corresponding, in this case, to two adjacent pitches. Average PMI was chosen as the
best representation of the formulaic nature of each melody because it has been shown to cor-
relate highly with originality when used to score items from tests of creative thinking (Harbison
& Haarmann, 2014).

Other predictors and controls

A number of variables were constructed as control variables for the purposes of the regression
analyses. Historical time was defined as the year of publication of each song, which in most
cases was the sheet music copyright date. In some instances (e.g., the songs of Thelonious
Monk) publishing copyrights were obtained much later than the dates of original recordings,
and so songs’ dates were then checked for accuracy using two reference works (Cook & Morton,
2008; Suskin, 2010). Composer age was defined as the difference between the composer’s birth
year and the year of publication for songs with one composer. For songs with multiple compos-
ers or lyricists, composer age was approximated by taking the average of the ages of the com-
posers at the time of publication. Each song was also labeled according to the number of
compositions contributed to the sample by the primary composer of the music—the first or only
name credited with writing the music for each song.
Finally, songs were assigned a dummy genre coding of 0 for songs written and performed as
instrumentals, and 1 for songs written with vocals. A song was designated as a vocal tune if it
was originality written as a vocal tune. This was applied even in cases in which the vocals did
not feature prominently in all cover recordings. Examples of the latter come from the career of
Duke Ellington, with many of his songs published as vocal numbers, only later to be performed
by his band and other musicians as instrumentals. The idea is that the initial melodic composi-
tion may have been constrained by the knowledge that a human voice was necessary for perfor-
mance, which in turn might restrict the range and combination of pitches used in the melody
(Simonton, 1994).

Results
All data preprocessing and analysis was completed using R (R Core Team, 2014), and the full
dataset and R script (written in R Studio) is available on the author’s Open Science Framework
account (see Author’s Note below). R software packages (in addition to the base packages) used
in the analyses were the lme4 package (Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2014) and the psy-
chometric package (Fletcher, 2010). Figures were constructed using the ggplot2 package
(Wickham, 2009).
All variables were checked against the assumptions of regression analyses including nor-
mality, except fame, which is clearly Poisson distributed (see Figure 1). Number of compositions
was positively skewed, mainly due to the fact that 56% of the composers included in this data-
base only contributed a single song. Inspection of a Q-Q plot confirmed that the number of
compositions variable was not fit for regression, and thus it was excluded from the subsequent
analyses. For the purposes of testing the curvilinear trends detailed by Simonton (1994), the
718 Psychology of Music 44(4)

Table 1.  Descriptive statistics and intercorrelations among variables across genres. Correlation
coefficients calculated using Spearman’s rho. Square box shows correlations among the originality metrics.
Historical time and composer age appear here in raw form, though both variables were centered for the
regression analyses.

Variable Mean (SD) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. Fame 54.24 (58.53) −  
2. Historical time 1943.88 (10.30) −.53** −  
3. Composer age 35.20 (7.50) .19** .02 −  
4. Repertoire Originality 0.98 (0.01) −.13** .23** −.14** −  
5. Zeitgeist Originality 0.00 (0.01) −.01 .01 −.16** .97** −  
6. Information Content 29.49 (4.45) −.14** .23** −.13** .96** .93** −  
7. Entropy 2.15 (0.29) −.13 .18 −.13 .36** .32** .37** –
8. Average PMI 1.46 (0.44) .01 −.07 .06 .01 .03 −.01 −.06

*p < .05, **p < .01, n = 553 songs.

“poly” function in R’s base package was used to create orthogonal linear and quadratic predic-
tors for age, historical time, and the various originality metrics where necessary. In other mod-
els in which only linear hypotheses were tested, the predictors were centered on their respective
grand means. Centering enables the use of the intercept value in HLM as an estimate of the true
mean of the criterion variable.

Comparisons of originality metrics

Table 1 contains the Spearman Rank-order correlations for all variables in the analysis. The
square box isolates the intercorrelations among the various originality measures. All three of
the metrics based on the transition probabilities (repertoire originality, Zeitgeist originality,
information content) correlated strongly with each other (r ⩾ .89). Entropy correlated signifi-
cantly with the transition probability measures, but not with average PMI. Average PMI did not
significantly correlate with any other originality variable.

Originality as criterion
To evaluate Simonton’s results relating originality to historical time, repertoire originality,
Zeitgeist originality, and information content were modeled with separate hierarchical models,
each of which included age at composition (level 1) and genre (level 2) as predictors. In the
repertoire originality and information content models, historical time was entered as a level 1
predictor. It was not considered a level-2 predictor because of the brief time-span of this corpus.
Because Zeitgeist originality is mathematically defined in terms of the average level of original-
ity per year, historical time was excluded from that model. Model testing proceeded in two
phases: testing of the null model and examination of genre-based intraclass correlation (ICC),
and random-intercepts model testing (Radenbush & Bryk, 2002). The unweighted ICC formula
was used following the guidelines set by Raudenbush & Bryk (2002) in order to ascertain the
proportion of variance in each originality metric between the genres. It can also be used as a
yardstick for assessing whether specification of level-2 variables is necessary (Woltman,
Feldstain, MacKay, and Rocchi, 2012). ICC was calculated using the “ICC1.lme” function in the
psychometric package (Fletcher, 2010). Finally, there is a controversy about the stability of
Hass 719

Table 2.  Results of regression analyses for the three originality criterion variables. Models A and C are
hierarchical linear models with a random intercept for each genre. The variance estimates (as standard
deviations) of the random effect of genre of Model B is an ordinary regression model. Unstandardized
estimates reported for interpretability. See text for the equations used in Models A and C.

Model A—Repertoire originality Estimate SE t-value 95% confidence interval

(HLM)

Predictors Lower Upper

(Intercept) 0.9773 0.0007 1380.7** – –
Composer age −0.0264 0.0090 −2.9* −0.046 −0.014
Age quadratic 0.0063 0.0083 0.8 −0.010 0.023
Historical time (centered) 0.0017 0.0004 4.0** 0.001 0.003
Random effects SD  
Genre mean 0.0008  
Level 1 variance 0.0082  
Model B—Zeitgeist originality (OLS) Estimate SE t-value 95% confidence interval
Predictors Lower Upper
Composer age −0.030 0.008 −3.65** −0.045 −0.011
Age quadratic 0.007 0.008 0.80 −0.009 0.023
R2adjusted = .02  
Model C—Information Content (HLM) Estimate SE t-value 95% confidence interval
Predictors Lower Upper
(Intercept) 29.67 0.56 53.14** – –
Composer age −11.07 4.83 −2.39* −23.34 −3.37
Age quadratic 4.23 4.29 0.99 −4.08 12.76
Historical time (centered) 0.80 0.24 3.32** 0.72 1.44
Random effects SD  
Genre mean 0.73  
Level 1 effect 4.26  

*p < .05; **p < .01.

Abbreviations: HLM = hierarchical linear model; OLS = ordinary least squares.

p-values from the lme4 package (Bates, et al., 2014), so they are not reported in the text, though
approximately significant results are flagged in Table 2.
The general two-level model for each of the originality criteria below can be summarized as:
Level-1 Equation (year = historical time):

Originalityij = β0 j + β1j (Year − Year) + β2 j (Age − Age) + β3 j (Age − Age)2 + rij

Level-2 Equations:
β0j = γ 00 + γ 01(Genre) + u0 j

β1j = γ 10 + γ 11(Genre) + u1j

β2 j = γ 20 + γ 21(Genre) + u2 j

β3 j = γ 30 + γ 31(Genre)+u3 j
720 Psychology of Music 44(4)

This notation is consistent with that used by Raudenbush & Bryk (2002) where the betas are
level 1 coefficients, the gammas are level-2 coefficients, and r and u are level-1 and level-2
(respectively) error terms. Additionally, level-1 predictors are specified in mean deviation
form so that the intercept is interpretable as an estimate of the true mean of originality
scores. Thus, originality of a song is conceived of as a function of the average originality
across songs (intercept), and the three level-1 predictors (historical time, age, and age-
quadratic)—which in turn are a function of the level-2 effect of genre—along with the
respective errors of estimation.

Repertoire originality. The intercept-only model for repertoire originality revealed ICC of .13
meaning that 13% of the variance in originality is at the genre level, and the remaining 87% is
at the song level. Therefore, the two-level model for repertoire originality was tested and
included age (linear and quadratic), and song date (centered on the grand mean) as song-level
predictors, with random intercepts for the two genres (see above). The main results are sum-
marized in Table 2A along with variance estimates. The estimated mean originality across gen-
res was β0j = 0.98. Originality increased with the passage of historical time (β1j = 0.0017).
Originality also significantly decreased as composers aged (β2j = –0.0264), with no significant
quadratic trend. If we consider originality the opposite of probability, as historical time passed,
compositions became more original by about 0.2 percent by year. Originality also dropped on
the order of 3 percent per year of aging.

Zeitgeist originality. The intercept-only model for Zeitgest originality revealed an ICC of .02
meaning that only 2% of the variance in originality is at the genre level, and the remaining
98% is at the song level. The lack of a strong Genre component led to an ordinary least squares
regression using the level-1 model above, and omitting Genre as a predictor. Zeitgeist originality
was thus regressed on age (linear and quadratic) yielding a significant overall result, with albeit
a small effect size, F(2, 550) = 6.97, p = .001, R2adjusted = .02. Again, Zeitgeist originality
decreased as composers aged (b = –0.03, p < .01), with no significant quadratic trend. The
interpretation is the same as above.

Information content.  The intercept-only model for information content revealed an ICC of .15
meaning that 15% of the variance in information content is at the genre level, and the
remaining 85% is at the song level. Step 2 again included age and historical time (linear and
quadratic) as song-level predictors, following the two-level equations above. The regression
estimates are summarized in Table 2C, along with variance components. The estimated mean
information content across genres was β0j = 29.67 bits. There was a significant increase in
information content over time (β1j = 0.81), but a decrease in information content as compos-
ers aged (β2j = –11.07), with no significant quadratic trend. Information represents the
base-2 logarithm of the product of the transition probabilities for each melody. Thus, the
coefficient for age represents a loss of 11 bits of information per melody as a composer ages,
while passage of time is marked by an increase of 0.81 bits per year.

Fame as criterion
As described above, Figure 1 shows that fame scores resembled a Poisson distribution, meaning
that Poisson regression is the ideal analysis for this data. However, the mean-variance ratio for
fame was 63.16 signifying overdispersion. Poisson regression holds this ratio at 1 because the
mean and variance of a Poisson distribution are assumed to be equal (Ross, 2010). To test
Hass 721

whether overdispersion would influence fame, fame was regressed on information content, his-
torical time, and composer age as a diagnostic check using a single-level quasi-Poisson general-
ized linear model. This procedure does not hold dispersion at 1, and the estimated dispersion
parameter of the quasi-Poisson model was very high (Destimated = 43.91). This indicates that the
variance in fame greatly outweighed the mean fame score per song.
To address an overdispersion issue in a count variable like fame, one can extend the general-
ized linear model to negative binomial regression (log link). However, introducing genre as a
level-2 factor causes some problems fitting cross-level interaction terms, as the estimation pro-
cedure for the likelihood function becomes extremely complex (see Help page for “glmer” in the
lme4 package). So instead of including genre as a random effect, the model for fame was fit
using the “glm.nb” function from the MASS package (Venebles & Ripley, 2002) in R. Specifically,
this allowed for a simpler analysis of how genre might moderate the relationship between origi-
nality and fame. As shown in the prior analysis, there was a significant amount of variability
across the two genres with regard to originality.
In addition to the stipulation that genre is a fixed effect in the final model, the analysis of
fame was further simplified by having information content stand as the only transition-proba-
bility predictor. There are three reasons for this: (1) Table 1 shows that information content
correlates nearly perfectly with both repertoire originality and Zeitgeist originality; (2) concep-
tually, information content seems theoretically more interpretable (i.e., bits of information in a
melody) than the two originality criteria used by Simonton (1994); and (3) it is easier to com-
pare the strength of the two new metrics—entropy and average PMI—as predictors of fame to
a single transition-probability metric, rather than three metrics.

Entropy and PMI metrics.  Before examining the explanatory power of all the predictors of fame,
two models were compared with a likelihood ratio test to examine whether the introduction of
entropy and average PMI as predictors was necessary. If a more parsimonious model, nested
within a larger model, does not significantly differ in terms of the likelihood functions of the
two, it is wiser to retain the more parsimonious (i.e., simpler) model. To make the comparison,
fame was regressed on all of the predictors, and then again regressed on all of the predictors
excluding entropy and average PMI. The likelihood ratio test of the two models was not signifi-
cant χ2(2) = 0.43, p = .81, and thus the more parsimonious model was retained. That means
that entropy and average PMI are somewhat superfluous to this particular model of fame.
Thus, the remaining analyses focused on information content as the only melodic originality
variable.

Additive fame model.  In the first model, fame was regressed on genre (instrumental as compari-
son group), and the following in both linear and quadratic forms: information content, age, and
historical time. Table 3A shows the results of the first model. Only genre (b = 0.87, p < .01) and
historical time linear (b = –8.96, p < .01) significantly predicted fame. Because negative bino-
mial regression has a log link function, exponentiation of the regression coefficient (e0.87 =
2.38) yields an incidence rate for the categorical predictor, genre. In this case, vocal composi-
tions were 2.38 times more likely to achieve high fame than instrumentals (see Figure 1). In
addition, fame decreased as a linear function of historical time, which is not surprising given
that fame is a cumulative measurement, such that the longer songs have been “on the market,”
the more likely they are to achieve cumulative fame.

Interaction model.  Because fame varied by genre, and the originality models showed that origi-
nality also varied by genre, a model with two interaction terms—genre × information content
722 Psychology of Music 44(4)

Table 3.  Negative binomial regression results predicting fame for an (A) additive model and a (B)
interaction model. The reference group for the Genre predictor is Instrumental. Unstandardized estimates
reported for interpretability.

Model A (Additive) Estimate SE z-value 95% confidence interval

Predictors Lower Upper

Genre 0.87 0.16 5.58** 0.59 1.14
Historical time −8.96 1.56 −5.76** −11.68 −6.23
Historical time quadratic −0.87 1.12 −0.78 −2.83 1.14
Composer age 2.16 1.24 1.73 −0.18 4.54
Composer age quadratic 0.38 1.07 0.45 −1.53 2.46
IC 1.20 1.23 0.97 −0.96 3.44
IC quadratic −1.84 1.15 −1.59 −3.51 1.20
AIC = 5336.6
Model B (Interaction) Estimate SE z-value 95% confidence interval
Predictors Lower Upper
Genre 0.85 0.16 5.44** 0.57 1.12
Historical time −9.48 1.55 −6.10** −12.23 −6.73
Historical time quadratic −1.37 1.12 −1.22 −3.39 0.70
Composer age 2.42 1.24 1.95* 0.08 4.79
Composer age quadratic 0.62 1.06 0.59 −1.29 2.70
IC 1.94 1.87 1.04 −1.59 5.46
IC quadratic −4.55 1.70 −2.70** −7.94 −0.92
Genre × IC −0.04 2.42 −0.02 −4.61 4.67
Genre × IC quadratic 5.79 2.39 2.42* 0.91 10.66
AIC = 5335.2

*p ⩽ .05; **p < .01.

Abbreviation: IC = information content; AIC = Akaike Information Criterion.

and genre × information-content-quadratic—was fit to compare with the additive model. The
results are presented in Table 3B, which shows that the interaction model yielded a very slight
reduction in AIC compared to the additive model. A more formal likelihood ratio test of the
comparison between the interaction model and the additive model suggested the interaction
model was a marginally better to the data (χ2(2) = 5.37, p = .06).
The estimates for genre and historical time are nearly identical to those in Table 3A. However,
one striking difference emerged in the interaction results. The addition of the interaction term
rendered significant both information content quadratic (b = –4.55, p < .01) and the interac-
tion between genre and information content quadratic (b = 5.49, p = .02). The first result indi-
cates that fame is an inverted U-function of information content, and the second indicates that
this effect is much stronger in vocal music compared to instrumental music. As Simonton
(1994) predicted, in this final model, fame has a nonlinear relationship to melodic information
content.

Discussion
There were two purposes to these analyses: (1) to test whether melodic originality varied across
historical time and across composers’ careers, and (2) to test whether melodic originality
Hass 723

predicted the fame of a sample of American popular songs. All three transition-probability
measures of originality (repertoire, Zeitgeist, and information content) decreased with age,
while repertoire originality and information content increased with historical time. The rela-
tionship between originality and historical time is consistent with Kozbelt and Meredith’s
(2011) reanalysis of Simonton’s (e.g., 1980a) data, showing a monotonic increase in original-
ity of classical melodies across five centuries, in contrast to Simonton’s (1994) fifth-order poly-
nomial results. The result for age is contrary to prior studies that show monotonic increases in
originality as age increases, before a plateau (e.g., Simonton, 1989, 1994).
Also, repertoire originality—defined by Simonton (e.g., 1980b)—was almost perfectly cor-
related with information content—calculated by taking the base-2 logarithm of the product of
the transition probabilities across bigrams. The latter is preferred both for the numeric range of
the scores and because the concept of information content is used by other music cognition
researchers (e.g., Hansen & Pearce, 2014). However, the other information-theoretic indica-
tors—entropy and average PMI—did not relate strongly to either originality or fame. It is not
clear why this is the case, except for the fact that in semantic analysis, PMI performs better when
the training involves a larger scale corpus (e.g., 1 million tokens) than the corpus presently used
(3318 tokens). Another interpretation is that PMI is only assessing how formulaic a melody is in
theoretical terms, but does not directly relate to how appealing the melody is. However, further
analysis with entropy and PMI using entire melodies, rather than the first six notes, may yield
different results. For example, Margulis and Beatty (2008) used entropy to aesthetically differen-
tiate various classical music genres. However, the goal of that analysis was descriptive, and the
authors defined entropy measure across entire genres (e.g., Bach Chorales, Mozart String
Quartets), rather than within a single song segment. Regardless, the utility of both entropy and
PMI should continue to be explored in studies of music analysis and aesthetics.
Perhaps the most interesting of the current results was that the inclusion of an interaction
term to control for variations in information content by genre led to a confirmation of
Simonton’s (1980b, 1994) hypothesis that a curvilinear relationship exists between fame and
originality. This is evidence that genre may indeed be moderating the originality–fame relation-
ship. Because the distribution of fame is non-normal, the relationship between fame and origi-
nality (conditioned on genre) is not a U-shaped function. Rather, Figure 3(a) shows that a high
concentration of vocal songs exists at the low end of the originality spectrum, all of which have
modest fame. Figure 3(b) shows a higher concentration of instrumental songs in the middle of
the originality spectrum, and that the songs with the highest fame also fell within this mid-
point. Comparison of the two figures also illustrates the variation in information content across
genres. Instrumental songs were far more varied in their originality than were vocals.
Finally, both figures show that the relationship between fame and originality is not a simple
one, and further nonlinear analyses should be conducted on similar datasets to explore the
complexities in this relationship. However, the current results do provide an important contri-
bution by showing that information content is related to fame in an interpretable way, namely,
that the relationship fits Simonton’s (1994) earlier assertions that there is an “optimal” level of
melodic originality between highly predictable and highly unpredictable that relates to high
fame.

Beyond the first six notes

In his analyses, Simonton (1994) raised the issue that an analysis of the first six notes of a
melody might not capture the aesthetic experience of listening to the song. The current analy-
sis did not measure aesthetic experience directly, but rather assessed fame in terms of citation
724 Psychology of Music 44(4)

600
Number of SHS citations

400

200

20 30 40 50
(a) Information content

300
Number of SHS citations

200

100

(b) 20 30
Information content
40 50

Figure 3.  Plots of information content scores and SHS citations for (a) vocal and (b) instrumental songs.

counts. Though the relationship between fame and originality is not linear, a significant
amount of variation in fame can be attributed to genre-based differences in information con-
tent. However, one important difference between this analysis and previous studies of classical
Hass 725

music is that only one segment of music from each song was examined. It may be the case that
analyses that examine different sections of popular songs—for example the differences among
refrains, verses, and bridges—will yield different results regarding the relationship between
fame and originality.
However, there is another aspect of popular music that the current analysis does not exam-
ine. It can be argued that one of the main functions of popular music is that people dance to it
(Wald, 2009). Indeed, Kozbelt and Burger-Pianko (2007) included metric and rhythmic varia-
bles in their analysis of the fame of lieder from Schubert’s career. Metric analysis may be less
important in the Great American Songbook as nearly all of the songs in this dataset were writ-
ten in 4/4, common time, or cut time. However, there are substantial rhythmic and stylistic
variations across the songs, and also across different performances of each song. For example,
Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” (1928) was written as a kind of sinister ballad, with lyrics in
German. Bobby Darin’s famous 1959 version featured a livelier feel based on Louis Armstrong’s
version from 1956. The fact that the Darin version was hugely successful may owe both to the
crooner’s singing style and to the swing feel, though the song was not performed as written.
The current analytic system cannot differentiate between different versions of the songs,
though there are efforts to do that in the music information retrieval community (e.g., Bertin-
Mahieux & Ellis, 2012).
Of course, not all popular songs feature happy, lively, danceable tempos. Schellenberg and
von Scheve (2012) found that over the past 50 years, popular songs have become progressively
sadder sounding—featuring more minor modes and slower tempos. Indeed, since the recording
industry boom in the 1960s, consumption of popular music has changed dramatically, includ-
ing an increase in the identification of a song with a single, definitive recorded version (Wald,
2009). Many people can now listen to music privately with headphones, rather than relying on
musicians to reproduce a song for them in the dancehall. Schellenberg and von Scheve con-
cluded that the changes in tempo and emotional complexity in popular music is not likely
attributed to a single cause. Instead, popular music content is likely an interaction among cul-
tural and personal variables. Future studies should continue examine rhythm and tempo in
relation to popular song fame, as they may provide more a more complete musical picture than
analyses focusing simply on melody.

Analysis of lyrics
Finally, popular song lyrics are an important aspect missing from the current analysis. This is
very important since the current analysis showed that vocal songs were two and half times
more likely to achieve high fame than instrumentals. Indeed, Wilder (1972) singled out Cole
Porter’s lyrics as being even more important than his compositional skills. However, Schellenberg
and von Scheve (2012) were skeptical about the results of studies that emphasized the impor-
tance of lyrics over musical content among more recent popular songs (e.g., Pettijohn & Sacco,
2009a, 2009b). Instead, the authors reasoned that more information could be gleaned from
the mode and tempo of the songs. However, none of these studies focused on the relationship
between lyrical content and fame, or long-term reception of the songs. Rather, the emphasis
was on examining listeners’ recollections about the songs and surrounding life events (see also
Krumhansl, 2010; Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013). Again, Kozbelt and Burger-Pianko (2007)
set a precedent for lyrical analysis by incorporating coding schemes from Martindale’s (e.g.,
1990) Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID), a text-mining tool designed to identify different
psychoanalytic, emotional, and conceptual themes in text. Comparison of a text-only model to
other models of fame revealed that the RID data did not account for much variance in recording
726 Psychology of Music 44(4)

counts. Instead, the authors concluded that the contributions of lyrics may be confounded by
the fact that lyrics must appear within rhythm. At the same time, the RID is biased toward iden-
tifying Freudian primary and process imagery, and Kozbelt and Burger-Pianko (2007) only
examined that data across the first six notes in each theme.
A far better approach to examining lyrical content is either the use of PMI scores or latent
semantic analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997) to measure semantic similarity both within and
across songs. This is much more in line with the melodic analysis systems covered in this article,
and latent semantic analysis has been successfully applied to many real-world text-analysis
tasks such as scoring student authored essays (e.g., Foltz, Laham, & Landauer, 1999; Kintsch,
2002). However, one downside of both of these analyses is they are not designed to examine
emotional content, as is emphasized in recent studies of popular music lyrics (e.g., Pettijohn &
Sacco, 2009a). Yet, it is easy to design natural language processing algorithms to search for
keywords among lyrics, and even among song titles (e.g., “love,” “happiness”). Future studies
should include these measures to more accurately assess the degree to which lyrics, over and
above melodic and rhythmic attributes, influence the fame of popular songs.

Limitations
Despite the intriguing results that emerged from the analysis, a few limitations should be
addressed. Though a substantial amount of low-fame works were included in this sample, at
most the dataset captured about 10% of the songs from any one songwriter. A concurrent
study (Hass & Weisberg, 2015) of the full careers of five of the most prolific songwriters included
in the database show that about 60% of songs fail to achieve any fame at all. The current
database was restricted to songs from well-known songbooks. Such books are designed for
performing musicians, meaning that lesser-known songs might be excluded. At the same time,
Figure 1 shows that the recording counts resembled the Poisson distribution that is to be
expected for such data (e.g., Simonton, 2003).
As always, archival analyses such as this one suffer from generalizability issues. However,
this corpus represents an excellent cross-section of songs written by a large number of compos-
ers and deliberately intended for mass consumption. Thus, the corpus represents a good testing
ground for hypotheses about aesthetics, originality, and fame that could be generalized to simi-
lar product domains.

Conclusion
The current analysis sheds light on the relationship between fame and originality among
American popular songs written in the first half of the 20th century. Two results from classical
music studies—an increase in originality over historical time and a non-linear relationship
between fame and originality—were replicated. However, originality and fame both varied sub-
stantially between vocal and instrumental melodies, and that difference seems to be moderat-
ing the fame–originality relationship. The most positive result from the current analysis is that
information content is an excellent way to quickly assess the originality of a melody, and is also
a construct well studied by music psychologists. Future work in this area will continue to shed
light on this fascinating relationship between melodic content and song success.

Author’s note
All of the data along with the algorithms for producing the dependent variables are available for down-
load at the author’s Open Science Framework account (direct link: osf.io/k6cz8).
Hass 727

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-
profit sectors.

Notes
1. The Great American Songbook is a term that refers loosely to the work of American songwriters
associated with the music publishing business that sprang up in New York City around the turn of
the 20th century (Wilder, 1972). Here the term refers to an amalgamation of Tin Pan Alley tunes,
Jazz Standards, and Broadway tunes all of which were sourced from a series of songbooks produced
for performing musicians. The songbooks represent a kind of musical dictionary of themes from this
era of American music, and are comparable to the classical music dictionaries used as source mate-
rial by Simonton (e.g., 1994) and Kozbelt & Meredith (e.g., 2011).
2. Dean Keith Simonton has published numerous papers on melodic originality, the details of which
were nicely summarized in his 1994 paper in this journal. This will be the primary citation used in
the current paper to avoid confusion. Readers are urged to consult that paper for details on the varied
analyses that Simonton conducted between 1980 and 1994.
3. Previous work by the author used the online database at www.allmusic.com for cover counts.
However, that database has been changed, and no longer allows for the kind of accurate searches
that were allowed previously. Importantly, concurrent analysis (Hass & Weisberg, 2015) shows that
the All Music Guide and the Second Hand Songs cover counts correlate at roughly r = .71.
4. Acknowledgement is due here to an anonymous reviewer for help in devising the probability assign-
ments for the entropy metric.

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Appendix
Sources of music:
The Real Book: Volume I. Hal Leonard: 2007
The Real Book: Volume II. Hal Leonard: 2005
The Standards Real Book. Sher Music Co: 2000
The New Real Book: Volume I. Sher Music Co: 1988
The New Real Book: Volume II. Sher Music Co: 2005
The New Real Book: Volume III. Sher Music Co: 2005