Scott Miles, PhD
Chief Visionary Officer at Dopr
When Olivia Rodrigo dropped her first single, 'drivers license', it immediately became a breakaway success. Millions of listeners streamed the song, helping it reach the top of many charts worldwide.
Why did this song become so popular?
Maybe people identified with the heartfelt sentiment of loss that the song expressed. Maybe people jibed with the coming-of-age theme, marking our shared experience with a rite of passage.
At Dopr, however, we couldn't help but notice the sheer mastery in the song's use of Rhythmic Surprise - specifically, the contrastive Rhythmic Surprise among the different sections of the song.
https://open.spotify.com/track/5wANPM4fQCJwkGd4rN57mH?si=9d286d01d1f34b6f
We have conducted extensive neuroscience research into how the structure of music leads to a dopamine pleasure response in the brain. One of the effects we have identified is called contrastive surprise. In our 2017 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, we reported this effect in Harmony—successful popular songs tend to use contrasting levels of chord rarity in successive sections, such as in a verse and in the chorus that immediately follows it.
Harmony is just one feature, however, that uses contrastive surprise to lead to a dopamine pleasure response in the brain. The ideal level of Familiar Surprise that we have found leads to optimal music enjoyment can be measured in terms of other aspects of music, such as Melody, Rhythm, Timbre, Texture, and Dynamics.
When talking about the contrastive Rhythmic Surprise in 'drivers license', it is important to recognize the Rhythm component of the melodic line in popular music.
When thinking about Melody, it is common to focus on aspects having to do with pitch—such as register, contour, or range. An example of a surprise in pitch would be a minor third interval in a major song, or shifting up an entire octave in the third chorus of a song. Melodies also have Rhythm, however, and the success of many popular songs has been attributed to very specific patterns of Rhythm within melodies.