Popular Science Explains Addicting Elements of HAMILTON Cast Album

"Addictiveness relies on being compelled to repeat something which creates a response," musicologist Thomas Peach explains in Popular Science. "We are repeating music not only for its musical value, but to re-live physical and emotional responses which accompany it."

For an original Broadway cast album you might logically think that the response someone might be re-living with every listen is the experience of seeing a musical live on stage, but why has the popularity of the cast recording of Lin-Manuel Miranda's HAMILTON grown far beyond the limits of its years' worth of people who have seen it?

"If you can figure it out, let me know," says Tim Latham, the mixing artist who worked not only on the cast albums of both HAMILTON and Miranda's debut Broadway musical, the Tony and Grammy winning IN THE HEIGHTS.

During the Golden Age, Broadway original cast albums were rush jobs recorded on the first day off after opening and released as soon as possible in order to help increase ticket sales.

Today, the process is more likely to take a few days, but Latham says HAMILTON took "roughly 34 days" to complete, with the creatives readily aware of the cutoff date for the 2016 Grammy awards looming.

"The best way to describe my job would be to make sure that the story translates," he explains. "I make sure that every note played by every instrument, every word, every syllable sung, is articulated in a way that is heard."

This attention to multiple levels of detail may be a major reason for repeated listenings.

"It is a very dense record," Latham says, "and it does require multiple listenings to absorb the whole thing."

Beginning with a single video of Lin-Manuel Miranda performing the musical's opening number for a White House audience that included President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, while the show was still in development, the HAMILTON experience has been a participatory one.

Social media has not only inspired an enormous amount of fan videos, fan art, and online conversations, but it has been a source of video and verbal communication between fans and the creatives.

"The music fuels the addiction to the community and the community fuels the addiction to the music," says Peach.

"I've seen Vines of people being the entire cast," says Latham. "All of the vocals. It's just amazing."

Latham also cites two technical factors that might add to the addiction while going unnoticed by even the most obsessive of listeners: dynamics and tempo.

"Musically, Hamilton fuses a base of rap and hip-hop with traditional musical theatre conventions. My job was to make sure the emotional impact of the story got translated, and a big part of that was the dynamics," says the mixer.

"If everything was the same volume from the beginning of the song to the end of the song, I'd find it tiresome to listen to," he says. "It'd be like watching an action movie where the action scene was edited at the same pace as the prelude to the action."

Regarding tempo, he notes, "A lot of popular music is one tempo from the beginning of the song to the end of the song, and it doesn't vary by a fraction of a second. Everything is on a grid." HAMILTON's score, however, contains subtle variations of tempi throughout.

"Musically, Hamilton fuses a base of rap and hip-hop with traditional musical theatre conventions and musical styles to create a new American songbook, diverse and rich," claims Peach. "I think that particularly for American listeners, listening to the story of Alexander Hamilton unfold with familiar dialects and musical sounds is a powerful tool for reconnecting with heritage and one which people feel compelled to repeat."

Of course, being a live theatre piece, the original Broadway cast recording is just a beginning. There's always the possibility of an eventual West End cast recording and a movie soundtrack. Perhaps even recordings in other languages to further fuel musical addictions.

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From the creative team behind the Tony Award-winning In The Heights comes a wildly inventive new musical about the scrappy young immigrant who forever changed America: AlexanderHamilton. Tony and Grammy Award winnerLin-Manuel Miranda wields his pen and takes the stage as the unlikely founding father determined to make his mark on a new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is.

From bastard orphan to Washington's right hand man, rebel to war hero, loving husband caught in the country's first sex scandal to Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy, Hamilton is an exploration of a political mastermind. George Washington,Thomas Jefferson, Eliza Hamilton, and lifelongHamiltonfriend and foe,Aaron Burr, all attend this revolutionary tale of America's fiery past told through the sounds of the ever-changing nation we've become. Tony Award nominee Thomas Kail directs this new musical about taking your shot, speaking your mind, and turning the world upside down.