Regarding a technical comparison of popular music

Mark Wieczorek wrote an interesting piece a few years back trying to characterize what it is about the ’sound’ of a certain decade’s popular music that makes it so. He does this by looking at frequency trends common to songs of a particular era, finding that changes in the fidelity of recording technology as well as other innovations seemed to attend the shift.

Not surprisingly, 300-500hz range where most speech tends to peak when recorded, and where, for instance, many of Edith Paif’s recordings center, is all largely deemphasized from the technically frenetic, ipod headphone optimized tracks of the early ’00s [link]