Tempo is an essential characteristic of music that can be used by artists to express specific emotions, suggest particular musical styles, create or release tension, even make us want to dance. Recent work has shown that the tempo of songs released by major artists including Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Eminem, and Elton John has decreased across their careers. This is hypothesised to be due relationships between typical age-related physical slowdown and close connections between music and body movement. This project examines tempo slowdown across artists' careers, listeners' tempo preferences as a function of age, and develops new computational methods for studying musical tempo at scale. Our goal is to create a first-of-its-kind model of musical tempo across the lifespan and generate new insights relevant not only to music as art or science but, given the fundamental role music plays in our everyday lives, to society as a whole.

2023

2027