Jazz and classical music have become simpler, a new study finds

Some music genres are getting simpler, new research shows Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now By Payal Dhar May 12, 2026 at 11:00 am Share this: Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print Jazz and Western classical music are now more like pop and rock — at least by one measure. The melodic and harmonic structures of jazz and classical have become simpler over time , according to a mathematical analysis in the April 23 Scientific Reports .  “We are observing an evolution in music,” says Niccolò Di Marco, a computational social scientist at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy. That shift may be fueled by digital technologies, which make access to and inspiration from recorded music easier. Di Marco and colleagues analyzed 21,480 musical pieces across six genres of Western music — classical, electronic, hip hop, jazz, pop and rock. The team used an audio file format, called MIDI, that encodes information such as notes played, their timing, duration and loudness in numeric values. From this, they extracted data about melodies and harmonies in the music, and used it to map the relationship between notes, such the order in which notes were played and which notes followed which. These networks allowed the team to then visualize and analyze patterns. On the whole, the distribution of this data was more uniform in newer musical genres, such as pop, electronic and rock. Older genres like jazz and classical music had more varied patterns. But when the researchers traced these trends over time, they noticed something interesting. The first half of the 20th century boasted quite complex structures in jazz and classical music. In later decades, there is a trend toward a repetitiveness of harmonies, intervals and other structural feature