8 MB - University of Toronto Magazine

Leading Edge
None of the top 40 songs of 1965 were composed in a
minor key, compared to 22 songs in the top 40 of 2009
Rotary Club
They gave the world the first humanpowered
“ornithopter” – a plane with
bird-like wings that flap. Now, a team
led by engineering alumni Todd Reichert
and Cameron Robertson is seeking to
build a human-powered helicopter.
The team has strong motivation: it hopes
to win the Sikorsky Prize, established in
1980 by the American Helicopter Society.
To win the $250,000 reward – the third
largest monetary prize in aviation history –
a team must fly a human-powered
helicopter for 60 seconds, and reach an
altitude of three metres while remaining
in a 10 metre square.
About 20 groups have tried, but no one
has been able to claim the prize.
The U of T-led team aimed to have their
helicopter built and flying by the end
of August. The most difficult aspect of
the project, Reichert says, is designing
helicopter components that are ultralight
and yet won’t break. “We test every
structure to failure so we’re sure of the
calculations,” he says. “Enormous care
must be taken to make sure that nothing
is sloppily done.” – Liam Mitchell
Sad Songs (Say So Much)
Research finds that pop music
is getting more melancholy – a sign,
perhaps, of the times
Growing up in the 1960s, Glenn Schellenberg spent much of his
weekly allowance on Beatles singles – sweet, boppy numbers
such as “Help” and “She Loves You.” In the ’70s and early ’80s,
the Manitoba native played keyboards with his own rock
band in Toronto, and sometimes with Martha and the Muffins
when they toured. Now a psychology professor at U of T
Mississauga, Schellenberg has applied his academic training
to look back at his youthful passion, arguing that pop songs
have become sadder over the last half-century.
Schellenberg and colleague Christian von Scheve, of the
Freie Universität in Berlin, examined the Billboard Hot 100
List in the last five years of each decade between 1965 and
2009, analyzing each song’s tempo and key. The researchers
determined that songs have grown dramatically slower over
time, and that a radical shift has taken place from major to
minor modes. More than 80 per cent of the most popular
songs on the radio in the ’60s were in the happier major keys,
compared with about 40 per cent of the more recent charttoppers.
Psychological research shows that slower songs in
minor keys tend to elicit more doleful responses.
“There is an element of taste here,” says Schellenberg.
“Increasingly, we tend to view music with negative emotions
as more genuine, and adult pop that is fast and in a major
mode as somewhat childish.” (He gives as examples ABBA’s
“Waterloo” or Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”) He also guesses there’s
a connection between the worsening economic times in the
West and the increasing melancholy of our songbook. “In
the music, you can see the postwar boom slowly going away.”
In short, there’s this feeling among many coming of age now
that they’ve arrived on the scene, in Neil Young’s evocative
phrase, after the goldrush. – Alec Scott
24 WWW.MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA
photo: Mike Campbell/ckmmphotographic