Bowie musicology: mapping Bowie’s sound and music language across the catalogue

Abstract

David Bowie’s music career is one marked by dramatic image transformations and unexpected and frequent aesthetic changes. However, if we look beyond the surface and analyse Bowie’s back catalogue for patterns and trends in his songwriting methodology, we can start to see evidence of a consistent creative voice that has been present and evolving throughout. This music language uses vocal articulations, idiosyncratic approaches to melody and harmony, mode and tonality, familiar and foreign sonic landscapes and nostalgic references to encode meanings beyond the lyric and immediate pop/rock style representation. Practices and processes that lead to the creation of shared meanings are located in the communicative exchange between creator and listener, a conversation that occurs at the intersection of Production and Consumption.

Notes

1. Machine Listening is a growing, interdisciplinary research field that seeks to develop technology that can extract meaningful information from audio signals. It is thought that perceptual mechanisms located and occurring in the human ear/brain can be simulated, offering potential for a computer to hear and understand audio content.

2. Tableau Public is a free software application that allows spreadsheet data to be turned into visualisations. http://public.tableau.com

3. All changes to the dataset are logged on the downloadable spreadsheet, and the latest version of the spread sheet is permanently located here: http://www.leahkardos.com/resources/Bowie-Data.xls