College Admissions Essay: The Evolution Of Music

The Evolution of Music I took my first music class in elementary school. We were taught all the classics like “Living on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi and learned about bands like “The Beetles” and “Dani California” just to name a few. Since then music has changed dramatically, these artists are still well renowned but I believe the classics are slowly being forgotten and left behind. How many millennials do you know that are listening to the Beetles today? There is a very small percentage of people that still listen to those classics. Now, enter hip hop and rap. This genre of music has been around since the 1920s and it has erupted into arguably the most popular music for our generation. Music is changing. This change in music is being illustrated

It is a Liberal Arts school in Mount Vernon, Iowa. We were required to take a first year seminar (FYS) class that interested us. I chose a music class. FYS classes were meant to be more interesting than challenging and were used as a way to get acclimated to college life. My FYS was about the history of music. We learned about famous time periods in music and how music has always been used as a form of expression. It has been used to voice opinions about social injustice or warfare. We also talked about how music has changed over time. My class consisted of all freshmen, we were all 18-19 years old. My professor was in his early forties and one day in class he was on a rant about “us kids and our loud music today.” When I heard him say this I instantly remembered all the countless times one of my parents or older family members complained about music being too loud. I used to think they meant volume but it turns out the volume at which we play music today isn’t the only thing louder. I also used to ignore them and dismissed their comments but turns out their complaints are backed by

The Echo Nest used a series of algorithms and a large set of data to get their results. They measured the average loudness of the top 5,000 songs from 1950 to 2010. The measure is not of the volume it is played at but instead the difference between the softest and loudest parts of a song. There is little difference between the softest and loudest parts of song which is what causes music to sound louder. Two graduate students from Rutgers that ran the research found that, “Popular music started getting louder during the heyday of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and The Everly Brothers, but only by a little bit. Right around the rise of the compact disc, in the very late ’80s, music started getting louder at a faster rate. The trend continues to this day” (Figure 1). Today the audio is so stabilized there is barely any difference between the loud and soft part. The trend is only going to continue since that is what it takes to make a hit