HELSINKI, July 26 — It’s often said that people slow down as they grow older, and for musicians, this adage seems particularly true. Indeed, a Finnish study claims that the songs of some of the biggest names in music tend to get slower as the years go by. Geoff Luck and Alessandro Ansani, two researchers from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), came to this conclusion after analysing the tempo of 15,000 songs by 207 artists, including Pearl Jam, Dolly Parton, Kenny G, Judas Priest and Cyndi Lauper.
To do this, the academics used a database containing data on 1.2 million songs available on Spotify. For the purposes of their research, they deliberately excluded tracks by artists with a career spanning less than 20 years, or who had released fewer than three albums.
Musicians born before 1955, or whose date of birth was unknown, were also excluded from the selection. The researchers then used artificial intelligence software to determine whether there was a link between the age of the musicians and the tempo of their songs. For bands, only the age of the lead singer was taken into account.
In their paper , published on the pre-publication site bioRxiv, the academics explain that the tempo of songs varies according to the age of the musicians when they composed them. For example, the tempo of the songs studied averaged around 120 beats per minute when the artist was a teenager, rising to almost 123 bpm as they headed into their thirties. Once past this age-related mile.