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This paper responds to the research presented in Léveillé Gauvin’s paper on the evolution of harmonic syntax in popular music from the 1960s. I begin by situating the findings from his second study (on flat-side harmonies) within the context of my corpus work with David Temperley on harmony in popular music. Léveillé Gauvin’s results are similar to ours, although some important differences are worth noting. I also provide an interpretation of the results from his first study (on modulation), which Léveillé Gauvin found to be inconsistent with his proposed hypothesis. Specifically, I conjecture that modulation and harmonic palette may be in balance with one another, in that listeners may prefer songs where harmonic content is at a medium level of complexity. Léveillé Gauvin’s study also brings forth some basic issues with regard to harmonic encoding, in terms of both the subjectivity of the analytical process as well as the ease by which harmonic analyses are shared with and verified by other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this research is to investigate the pitch structures of popular music in the 1960s through a large corpus study in order to identify any consistent changes in harmonic and tonal syntax. More specifically, two studies based on the Billboard DataSet (Burgoyne, Wild & Fujinaga, 2011; Burgoyne, 2011), a new corpus presenting transcriptions for more than 700 songs, are presented. The first study looks at the incidence of multi-tonic songs throughout the decade, while the second study focuses on the incidence of flat-side harmonies (e.g. bIII, bVI, and bVII) over the same period of time. While no difference was observed in the frequency of multi-tonic songs, the study showed a significant increase in the incidence of flat-side harmonies during the second half of the decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]