Scientists have found that modern pop music is intrinsically louder and "does all sound the same", report Reuters.

Research boffins at the Spanish National Research Council used the Million Song Dataset, a massive archive containing the audio and lyrical content of pop songs from 1955 to 2010, to analyse various musical elements including chord progressions and timbre.

Their report, which is published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that chords and melodies have become simpler and the “timbre palette” had narrowed.

Worryingly, they also found that by taking an old song and simply increasing the volume at which it is recorded and by making the chord progression less complex, it could instantly sound more contemporary.

As the Quietus has previously reported, in Daniel Barrow’s excellent article ‘A Plague Of Soars’, ubiquitous modern compositional techniques have made pop music more uniform.