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Study Finds New Pop Music Does All Sound the Same
whoever57 writes "A study of music from the '50 to the present using the Million Song Dataset has concluded that modern music has less variation than older music and songs today are, on average, 9dB louder than 50 years ago. Almost all music uses just 10 chords, but the way these are used together has changed, leading to fewer types of transitions being used. Variation in timbre has also reduced over the past decades."
So it isn't just me?
So are we forgetting all of the articles on The Loudness Wars and "hit song 'science?'"
Glee!
That shit all sounds the same. Same Autotuned voices that are bland and boring.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
I'm shocked.
Scientific approach aside, I think the more interested you are in something, not just a musical genre, the more you are inclined to notice the components which differentiate one from the other. If you aren’t interested in a specific genre of music, then yeah, it’s all going to sound the same because your brain goes into "ugh, techo" mode.
My music tastes tend to hover around the classic/progressive rock band. Most Techo/electric/dubstep/house/etc all sounds the same to me because my brain doesn’t even spend the effort to actually listen (where it would notice the differences) and just goes “ick”. Same with pop music, country, rap.. (especially rap!).
Axis of Awesome - Four Chord Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
9 might sound like a small number, but dB is a logarithmic measuring. 9dB louder (please correct me if I'm wrong) mean 8 TIMES louder.
morcego
Wasn't this inevitable? It's way cheaper for "concept" artists to use tried and true melodies than really break the mold with something new. Who would want to invest in crap like that?
The title should read "Study Finds New Pop Music Does All Sound the Same, Terrible"
Try looking up 4 Chords, by The Axis of Awesome. They go through quite a few songs that all use Pachelbel's Canon. Would post a link, but my mobile sucks with that...
It's way cheaper for "concept" artists to use tried and true melodies than really break the mold with something new. Who would want to invest in crap like that?
Anyone who doesn't want to get sued for accidental copyright infringement (e.g. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music or Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton) would have to invest in something to create a novel melody.
Eh.. Only four bases used in your DNA. What's your point?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
and rap (or hip hop, I guess there's a difference, all sounds the same to me) is more than 25 years old. There was a time when a new sound emerged i.e. jazz, rock-n-roll, acid rock, disco, .... but I wonder if The Business has priced itself out of the market and made huge barriers to new creative music. 30 years ago there was 30(?) major labels which have combined to just four (and they spend a lot of time going after pirates). So based on that, it doesn't surprise me someone publishes an article like this one. An not surprising we have posts such as, "Really?," "This is news?," and "Not just me."
mfwright@batnet.com
Why is it everytime I read ./ all of these stories are just repots from the Reddit frontpage?
No, that's meant to be just four chords are used in pop hits...
If it's not a hit, or doesn't need to be, then you're permitted to use the other six pop chords in composition.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
If you are going to go in jail for "inventing" something old, why care???
Enough variation? Yeah yeah yeah
Manufactured people making manufactured music all sounds the same.
Who would have thought...
>> "Million Song Dataset has concluded that modern music has less variation than older music"
You have successfully preserved the "IP".
--whacky
The buddy movie formula.
The rom-com formula.
Science fiction seems to be narrowing into white spaceships shoot other white space shits with coloured lazers.
Disaster movies
All hollywood movies are narrowing to become a few basic formulas too. This is the way of the world, everything tends to blandness via entropy.,
Is it a big surprise that contemporary music sounds alike? They keep sampling each other's songs, with and without permission, and recycling the all sorts of song elements. That is before you consider different bands performing each other's music outright. The current custom seems to produce homogenized music.
Rick James - Super Freak
MC Hammer - U Can't Touch This
Jay - Z Kingdom Come.
Gucci Mane - Freaky Gurl
Wikipedia has a more complete list.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
No pun intended, but Phil Specter knew that 49 years ago. The son 'Da doo Ron Ron' was deliberately made to be the sum of all pop songs, which was the theory behind the Wall of Sound', and IMHO has artistic merit for that point alone.
A clear and present danger rears its gnarled and ugly head, Anthropogenic Global Music (AGM).
Studies are showing that AGM is responsible for increases of Tornados, Extreme Storms, the North
Pacific Decadal Oscillation, HIV, Bank failures and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
The USA wants us to believe that the fall of Saddam Hussein was directly due to their killing and rampage of
the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, there is no evidence of this! The fall of the regime of Saddam
Hussein was due to AGM.
What will AGM do to Somalia, Syria, the Balkans, and the other client states of the CIA Rendition-Terror
Prisons (our tax dollars at work) sanctioned by non other than George Walker Bush and his son
Barak Hussein Obama II.
SoL
Which of course is clearly inspired by this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
This just in: All music from a particular genre sounds very similar. Story at 11.
Could literally be replaced with a simple script that generates lyrics using a small keyword dictionary, another script that mashes several midis of other songs using some basic rules to create "original" music, then pipes the output into festival, then pipes that into autotune. We could even add another script that uploads the result to itunes.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The study is about perception of novelty in pop music, learn to read scientific reports before coming with sensationalist tittles that look down on a music genre that a lot of people love. "This brings us to conjecture that an old popular music piece would be perceived as novel by essentially following these guidelines."
That's three more than most slash dot discussions.
Didn't Flight of the Conchords do it earlier than Axis? I'm sure some /.er will correct me.
i thought the grunge (Pixies/Nirvana/etc.) was the 'last one' as it was quite innovative (me thinks), but this was also some 20+ years back
The wiki article on that describes it from a music theory PoV. I guess they really don't write songs like that anymore.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The purpose of popular music was never to provide musical diversity and variety. At root, it's a folk art form and like all folk art forms, it's going to be stylistically similar.
If you look at the popular music of 16th century England or 19th century America (the two countries who have the biggest effect on worldwide pop music) you would probably find even less musical variety than the music of today.
Also, remember, that the 1950s, the era that this study compares to our current era, there was a confluence of some very different musical forms making up "pop music". There was big band music, with roots in Jazz and the American Songbook, there was country, blues, R&B all collapsing in on each other to form the popular music of the day. You might hear Tommy Dorsey, Frankie Lane, gospel, Louis Jordan, Hank Williams. Top 40 radio of even the 1960s would have the Beatles fighting it out for the top of the charts with Sergio Mendes, elements of deep country, Frank Sinatra singing "strangers in the night" and Sonny and Cher, folk music, etc.
But the biggest influence on the homogeneity of current popular music is the concentration of ownership of media outlets. You have a handful of companies owning 90% (or more) of the radio stations in the US, for example. You scan the dial in LA, Chicago, New York, Memphis or Rolla Missouri and you're going to hear the same top 20 songs, the same "classic oldies" stations, the same "urban contemporary" and they're all owned by the same companies, using their market position to put the same exact formats (and often the same exact program directors) on all of the stations in any given category.
The days of the independent radio stations is over. Satellite radio was supposed to offer variety, but now there's even a growing concentration of ownership in those stations. And who sells all the records? Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and other chains, who really aren't going to give you much variety.
It's not the music that's lacking variety, it's the economy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The "Loudness" of the recording is irrelevant - the customer will just adjust his/her volume knob. All producers do when they supposedly increase the loudness of a track is *reduce the dynamic range* - THAT'S the real cause of the dynamic "sameness," not sheer loudness.
See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Ironic - CAPTCHA: "noises"
I have long equated most pop-music with baby music, or heavy nursery rhymes. But when I saw this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uee_mcxvrw
I began to consider that - albeit possibly pathological - something has infected pop.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
...of real musicians creating real music with real instruments... http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9wLQNrr15sA&v=9wLQNrr15sA&gl=US Enjoy...
I bet it'll be even worse a decade from now.
So this means we're zeroing in on what humans prefer to hear right? ....right?
Dude, thanks for this! It explains so much. It's amazing how so many terrible songs can be woven together to make something tolerable. But the best pop-reparations I've found so far, I must attribute to Richard Cheese. You might enjoy my personal favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwOE0aP-LAk
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
ooops! Sorry about the bad url; I intended to refer to this one for Richard Cheese: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzFX44P7SO0 -- I can't imagine anyone else ever repairing such a tremendous feat of auditory effluent into something so close to actual music. When that song (doncha) first came out, I lost some part of my respect for anything between two human ears, but Cheese has redeemed it. The Bjork part is brilliant!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Obligatory Wierd Al Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uyyQlIIE5k
as South Park so nicely explains http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/388728/it-sounds-like-poo
If apple wrote a song, you'd be sued for using the same sequence of chords, or the same key. With pop music, if you don't do that, you don't get to be #1 on the billboards. It's a strange world we live in....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I've got the wrong brain for music, but can someone tell me if this is also true for a song like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTklGbD19F4 (VNV Nation - Space & Time.)
Or does it use different chords?
Is it also true for something like this or is that totally different (is it "chords" at all?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfuierUvx1A (Conspiracy - Chaos theory 64k demo.) (Oh what the heck, Razor1911 - The scene is dead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFXIGHOElrE)
Things like these aren't accords either? The guitar is?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIL2ttBqTsM (Infected mushroom - I wish (Skazi remix))
How does it work with "blip bloppy" electronic music in general? Is a hit on a single drum piece and accord or do you have to hit multiple at once?
Thanks to the people who know their stuff =P
There are a lot of songs you can recognize instantly from the 60's and 70's because they used unusual instruments like the sitar.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR4c0R10678 :D) but I was more wondering for the more regular music so to speak.
Insert no coins is pretty fabulous to (more blippetiblopp
Also I enabled my karma bonus to get a higher score and get noticed more since I usually post with no karma bonus but people don't seem to notice me considering I don't get moderated up... ;D :)
But I ended up at a score of 1 anyway? Why is that? Have I lost my bonus due to lots of score 1 posts lately? Or just not hanging around enough on Slashdot the last years? I think my karma still is excellent. Guess I just don't know how that stuff work. Hope someone can help
Rather than the usual "society is going downhill" view, it may be that there is already so much existing pop music that people who want an "in style" sound go to the new stuff, while those wanting variety dig in the old stuff.
In the past there wasn't that choice such that variety in contemporary artists was more in demand. Even my teen daughter digs into The Beatles. However, she wouldn't play it around new friends.
In short, newer music has a smaller niche to fill than in the past: sounding fashionable only.
Table-ized A.I.
Songs on kiss fm can be typified by the following bass line:
Whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump,...
I tried, yes, I really tried, to read through TFA, filled with scientific jargons and graphs and such
And then I read the summary on economist.com
Both mentioned "10 chords" that were used most
Unfortunately, after reading both articles my eyes have gone bonkers, and now I simply couldn't locate the "10 chords" that they were talking about
Which are the "10 chords" that were most regularly used?
Anyone??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There is only four cords used in a pop song/hit, but you can chose from a total of ten :-)
Really simplistically, recording with 9dB less headroom increases the AVERAGE volume by 9db and the PEAK by 0db.
So adjusting your listening environment back down by 9dB to compensate for the 'loudness wars' and return the music to same AVERAGE level actually reduces the PEAK volume by 9dB ... either the average volume goes up or the peak volume comes down, or in reality partly both
Simply, the loudness wars caused the PEAK volume to decrease ... feel free to disagree ;-)
Same goes for history. Knowing specific dates and the names of influential people is generally unnecessary and should not be required of all students. People should understand history in broad strokes and get lessons about cause and effect, not memorize dates and names they will forget the next day.
Same goes for [insert subject here].
Only 4 bases makes common humans.
By adding more, you get perfection...
This study shows that music analysis algorithms are still crappy.
Rap is a broad term to describe several different types of spoken word poetry* put to a beat. Rap is an old slang word that means to talk.
*I'm not saying I personally think it is or isn't poetry, but the people who preform it consider it as such.
No, your granpa knew it too.
Do a search for "Beardyman"; I think you'll find it quite refreshing and inspiring, even if it's a bit unusual. Here, I'll give you a start, where he does Aphex Twin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55l1PZZgUOA -- If you have time, or interest, I highly recommend watching/listening-to the many hours of other Beardyman pieces. I am a vicious musical cynic and damn-near freaked out when I first discovered this fellow's work. There are also a lot of other worthy genres surfacing and mutating; like glitch, and even some dubstep. Don't despair -- there is hope.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Like crap?
If you look at the popular music of 16th century England or 19th century America (the two countries who have the biggest effect on worldwide pop music) you would probably find even less musical variety than the music of today.
In addition to modern music, I do enjoy classical music, and yes, there are repeats (and repeats-of-repeats) embedded in many classical music
In fact, there's a genre in the classical music where the same tune is repeated and repeated - sorry, brain still not functioning at the wee hour, can't think of the name of the genre
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Understanding that pop music in this article surely refers to popular music of today and not specifically electronic, mostly dance, music, I've got a few complaints about this article.
1. If you analyze music based solely on the mathematical characteristics of the sound without any historical or cultural context, you might as well follow with a critique of paintings by counting the number of colors used by Rembrandt vs those used by Warhol.
2. Music is genealogy. Ergo, similarity must exist. It indicates the convergence of genetics from multiple sources into a singular modern pop musical form. Today's popular music can have a rhythm section that borrows heavily from Caribbean sounds which borrow from African, and yet have neo-classical European influences in the melody. We'll ignore the fact as we're talking about western music, we're already dealing with a specific set of genetic traits.
3. The commonality of musical instruments (digital gear included) means that there will be common sounds. Most the hot rodded guitar pickups you buy today are based on one of two platforms: mahogany and maple bodied PAF guitar or alder/ash bodied single coil guitar. PAF was a 50's era technology. One of the pickups I play today is a 36th Anniversary Dimarzio PAF that is a copy of the original Gibson PAF. Also: Def Leppard's "Hysteria", ZZ Top's "Eliminator", and Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" are three genetically diverse rock albums which share a similar sound because all three employ the use of Tom Scholz' Rockman guitar amp, compressor and chorus/echo gear which Tom created to encapsulate his signature Boston guitar sound. Additionally, much of the synth sounds used in pop music are signature preset sounds that vary between brands and models of keyboard synthesizers. Yes, folks, just as there is a Fender sound and a Marshall sound, there is also a Korg sound and a Roland sound.
4. Music has gotten louder in part because music has gotten heavier due to the influences of each generation before. I myself a British rock guitarist. My sound is the British sound (ie, Marshall amps, V shape equalization, heavy overdriven PAF style humbucker sound with obvious blues background that originate in the Mississippi Delta mixed with decidedly German cultural influences). I was influenced by bands that were influenced by Led Zeppelin, Buddy Guy, and so on. The kids who came after me were influenced by bands that were contemporary to my sound (Metallica and so on). There's a reason why I don't hear a lot of blues in today's harder heavy metal, and it's because those kids grew up listening to Metallica in the 90s whereas I grew watching Metallica in the 80s. Every genre of music has gotten heavier. Hip Hop/Rap musicians aren't doing Zip Zap Rap anymore. Even American country music is heavier and more rocking today than during the days of Merle Haggard. Pop music today is heavily influenced by the club scene as it has been for a long time. And today's club scene is very bass-heavy.
5. 60 years is not a long enough time to be making an educated criticism about how today's music sounds the same. 60 years is not even the lifetime of a person. 60 years means I can take Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Ry Cooder, Frank Zappa, David Gilmour, Tony Iommi, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Adrian Smith, Paul Gilbert, Slash, John Mayer, Joe Bonamassa, and Orianthi Panagaris, and put them into a single room and they will find a common dialect in music with which to communicate. And actually, with a few exceptions, I can do that. The point is, in 2012, we're still only a few generations removed from the earlier pop musical forms that are perceivably distinct enough that we'd consider them alien in comparison; for example, big band music.
6. Congratulations, with this research at hand, some crotchety geezer can shout that it sounds the same, then blame some anonymous music industry exec for ensuring that all music anywhere is exactly similar.
So that's why it sounds like Nickleback has only ever written 2 songs...
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
And all the waves of it that followed it up until the recent 'blackgaze' trend basically bucked ANY trend of this century. If you want organic, look no further.
Maybe they have just "perfected" pop music, making any changes/variation totally unnecessary.
Seems they just keep repeating the same "classic" rock songs over and over, why make anything new.
Look at the 70s. The vastness of musical genres was amazing. As bad as the recording industry was, it just let artists be artists and we got a 1,000 unique styles and voices. Look at the female vocalists. Not a professional model among the lot, but sweet jebus they could wail your brains out at 50 paces. Today must is preprogrammed, preprocessed, tested for all the parameters that will make it a top 20s hit, and press fit to the production standards bankers have come to know and love. The women are all size 0, curly blonds, with precise the right dimples, and are so perky you wanna stick'em with hat pins to see if they explode.
Go to the indie providers. All the great musicians are still making music, just not for the bankers.
What is "rap music"? Rapping is a technique which is used across a wide range of genres (acid jazz, hip-hop, grime...) "Rap music" is only a slightly more precise term than "guitar bands".
There used to be a "rule" that music had a beginning, a middle and an end. Lots of music still does but "techno" (excuse my ignorance on a type of music I don't like listening to) has some songs (not all) that are just a synthesizer left on auto-run and song "length" is just how long it took the sound engineer to take a crap after he hit record and hitting stop.
It is probably valid music but it doesn't carry much variation.
Some music is meant to be enjoyed with beer and some is meant to be enjoyed with xtc. Want variance? Go for music that doesn't require you to cripple your brain first.
Because the article makes one fatal flaw. The old music, it is still here. Never went away in fact. With each new song, the variation goes UP not down. It might not be a variant you like but you can still listen to the old stuff. And lets be honest, back in the golden days, the pop charts were just a filled with the same copies as now. The difference is that we only remember the really good ones.
Listen to a top 2000 from the bottom. It takes a LONG time before the music starts getting good.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Really, if you want to avoid being sued for accidental infringement, plagiarize a tune from the great "classical" music composers or some folk tune, for that matter. Then you can claim you got your melody from them.
Progressive rock in many cases has tried to replicate, though not often with as much success, the complexity and diversity of classical forms.
Eh ?
:-)
Look mate....... All the truly great music, anything from Beethoven to the Rolling Stones, sounds very simple, but when you break it down you realise it's actually very complex.
Prog Rock on the other hand, sounds very complex, but when you break it down you realise it's moronic.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Woody Guthrie said that if you're using more than three or four chords in a song you're just showing off. And a lot of the garage bands of the 50s-70s started off only knowing four chords, and that was really enough; you could always transpose if you didn't know the chords.
I play a few genres of traditional music - old-timey, Irish, a bit of bluegrass, some folk, some German. I mainly play mountain dulcimer, which is a diatonic instrument, so changing keys is annoying, since you have to retune, as opposed to guitars, pianos, and accordions where you've got the whole chromatic scale there. It turns out that there's a very wide range of music that not only uses only 3 or 4 chords per song, but always uses the same scale because that's friendly to the fiddle player or piper, and also if you don't have many strings, you can't play very complicated chords. But just because it's the same few chords, that doesn't mean the melodies aren't complex and/or weird, and I don't think they were measuring that.
So it's I, IV, V (or V7, especially for blues), and maybe a VII or the minor ii or minor vi. And the key is usually in D or G, or E minor for Irish, or A for old-timey (though the A tunes might not be an major scale - they're often Dorian or Mixolydian, which are a bit minor, though the chords will usually still be A, D, G, and sometimes E.) So the chords end up as D, G, A, C, and occasionally E or Em or Bm.
French traditional music seems to mostly use a C scale instead of a D (so it's like playing on the white keys of the piano instead of transposed up a whole step.) I've been doing some German beergarden stuff recently, and it's been all over the map - most of it's 3 or 4 chords, but maybe the key is C or F or Bflat (which is brass-friendly), and there are a lot of 7th chords because accordions are good at those and they sound a bit schmaltzier.
And yes, the jazz and classical people always did much fancier chord work. And there are a lot of amazing guitarists out there, and sometimes if you can't figure out how they played something it was because they're using alternate guitar tunings to get different chord inversions, or they threw in an ARRR-flat-7th-diminished-dominant9th chord just to add some color or because it matched the lyrics or covered up the horribly wrong note the bass player had just played. (By contrast, if a bluegrass guitar wants to show off, it's more likely to be by playing a riff extra-fast by adding grace notes, or by throwing in a few bars from another well-known song that's related in some way. And if Woody Guthrie wanted to show off, he'd doing it by writing some really incisive lyrics or getting the audience to go on strike.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well somebody had to say it!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In short: you don't need actual chords to infer the tonality of a piece. Even if I only play single notes, but they revolve around G, D and Bb, I'm in G minor.
the music is poured into mp3, is digitally mastered or whatelse to make it sound awkward.
I can't hear very well, but mp3 music is lossy even too me.
cb
The subtle yet profound chord progressions of rap music must have been overlooked.
Seastead this.
Only 4 atoms in most chemistry.
Great Intellect...
meh...
The inverse of "on and off are what computers do" is the point.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
This study is flawed in that it down't take rhythm into account, modern pop music with its Hip Hop influences has more emphasis on rhythm than pop music from the past which had stronger romantic movement influence where rhythm tends to be simpler because it is constrained by its need to service the harmony, this is a well understood aspect of early to middle romantic music, it was't until the later part of the romantic movement/avant-garde where there was more acceptance of dissonance in music that more experimentation with rhythm occurred. But this later movement had very little influence on popular music as popular music had taken over a lot of the role that classical music had in the past, the later romantic movement was of interest only to academics and classical music geeks.
Oh I'm so glad this wasn't a potato joke.
There are a lot of culprits. The risk-averse music business mafia, the declining mental prowess of so-called "musicians" with brains fried on too much drugs, the increasingly tone-deaf younger consumers with ears shot by too many nights at the disco or dance club, the dying out older consumers who could discern the shit being sold today and refuse to buy it. A perfect storm, actually.
Pretty soon polyphony will be a rarity, with "songs" being just words being monotonically grunted out by rappers and the like to the rythmn of a drum or two. A scene worthy of a neolithic cave. Wonder if there will be any Gregorian monks left to lift us out of such dire straits.
Bad analogy. There are only four bases used in DNA, and two bits used in an audio file: that's the data storage. There are twenty amino acids used in proteins and four chords used in songs: that's the rendered product.
But I listen to Bhangra you insensitive clod!
I shouldn't be posting this:
http://youtu.be/Z5AQk6-jB-A?t=11m9s (11:09 Morgonjuice.)
It's easy to dismiss today's pop-music as simplistic and look up to Wagners and Mozarts of the past. However, 200 years ago, most of the western worlds population never heard an opera and the music they were playing/singing and listening to was just as simplistic. A typical tune, like Pastime with Good Company was nowhere near the complexity of the Ride of the Valkyries
On the other hand, there is still a lot of serious music being made now-days that is being listened to by a minority, just like before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAylogfO7Hs
^ wouldn't work if it was too complex (may still not work as is for you, but works for me).
If you make it because you want to say something, or just hypnotize and/or enjoy yourself, anything you do is a Good Thing in my books. If music becomes more simple on average, that might also mean it becomes more accessible? By that I mean, every fucktard can make "music" these days -- I must know, I did it myself. And yes, it's super simple and shallow, I ain't a musician. But it's fun to do, and beats just singing the songs others wrote.
Also, I will always love the song "Doop". Sue me :P Actually, there are many simple songs I like... for example, how is The Blue Danube Waltz not simple, and how is that a problem? To me that is THE pop song of classical music, and I love it to bits.
Orwell said about writing that bloat and pretension come from dishonest aims. I think that's not entirely fair (when taken out of context at least), because maybe it also can come from the sheer joy of language and strange words, sometimes. And perhaps you can say the same for music... sometimes it's complex because someone got really lost into what they were doing, sometimes it's complex because it's over-engineered bullshit, sometimes it's simple because it came from the heart from untalented or unpracticed fingers, sometimes it's simple because it's a money-making scam. I'd say, play from and listen with your heart. The calculator cannot help you here.
Take this for example. Is it music? For me it's just a buildup to be able to say something in last part, only then the previous repetition takes on meaning by being chopped up... that's just a guess, I can't put the finger on why I adore this song.. maybe I'm just rationalizing it ^^ But for me the intro HAS to be simple and kinda boring, so the ending has a stage on which to do a very short and very powerful dance. Not complex by any means, and it would mean nothing, or anything, without the vocal sample. So what... ?
Am I right that Indian traditional music uses a different set of scales? (for example)
I think the article is focussing on western pop music - by which I think they mean European and North American, plus NZ and Aus?
I'd imagine there are a range of other musical styles and structures out there, including for pop music. Lots of vibrant youth cultures all round the world. In the UK for example we regularly get waves of influence from cultures outside the USA and Europe (e.g. from across Africa and Asian continents). So I'd be suprised if all these musical forms come down to half a dozen chords: bhangra/bollywood sounds very different for a start to my ears. Though I am no musician and I'd welcome being educated!
Movies are mixed with absolute reference levels in mind. The THX theater spec is 105dB peak for the mains, 115dB peak for the sub. That is the actual level to which movies are mixed. Doesn't mean they have to reach them, but it means they can. A calibrated, THX compliant home system will be able to reach 105dB when the volume dial is set to 0dB (they backed off on the sub for home, requiring only 105dB as few would be willing to spend the money required for 115dB).
Movies are set up to be able to have big hits, and action movies use them. Speech is often 30-40dB below the peaks (Dolby tracks contain encoding letting the decoder know the dialogue normalization relative to peak).
Also in terms of sound, it isn't a 100% subjective "just get used to lower levels" thing. Your perception of loudness is not equal across frequency bands. Have a look at the Equal Loudness Contour graphs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour). These show at what level a signal must be played to be perceptually equal per frequency. So if you wanted to listen to music at 40dB for the midrange, which is barely over the noise floor of most houses, you would need the lowest bass frequencies to be near 100dB to give equal loudness. However moving up to 80dB for the mids, you only move up to 120dB for the lowest sounds.
So just reducing the volume does not give the same sonic experience unless you re-equalize the track. For movies with their soundtrack encoded at reference levels on disc (something you don't find as often as you should) there is technology to do so on higher end receivers like Audyssey Dynamic EQ and Dolby volume, but it is hard to do for music as there is no reference standards.
You also run in to the problem of signal to noise ratio. Anything less than 40dB (meaning a signal 40dB above noise) is pretty easy to notice, and you can hear more than that. Well, if your room has an ambient noise level of 30dB, which is pretty quiet for a room in an urban setting, you need 70dB average signal level to get 40dB of SNR.
Finally, if you want music that is largely or completely devoid of dynamic compression, you need a good deal of headroom. Many instruments can have large transients. So for example if you want 20dB of headroom, you'd need playback set to do 90dB for a signal that was 70dB average. Pop music doesn't do that, it is squashed to all hell and gone, but classical can. As a simple example I have a track that I mixed from an old videogame MIDI using real sampled instruments. It is normalized to 0dBSPL (as you do with digital tracks), however the RMS level is -17.5dB. So you need to set the volume dial 17dB higher than the average level you wish to maintain, because it has large peaks (this is in an unprocessed state, no compression applied).
While I'm all about not abusing the volume dial and hurting your hearing, sound perception is more complex than "Just turn it down and you'll get used to it."
Many factors. Number one is there really are No Bands around, because there are so few places to play, everywhere. A few in urban centers, but live music was once the thing, everywhere. Feminism, MADD and the trend towards disco/DJ's combined to shut down the live stuff. Dance influence required steady beats, no changes. Female dominated disco/dance meant men followed along, as contrasted to bad boy rockers intent on blowing the doors down, women on the chase. Police state enforcement meant everyone had to tone it down. Busted for drivin while blind. Yuppification of urban hot spots is another force. Greenwich village, eg. Get off my lawn.
So there are far fewer live performers, less competition, less experience with live, knowing what moves people. If the band sucked, there was another club around the corner, down the street, in the next town. So you needed to not suck. Stuff that develops out of a jam lives/breathes grows, accidentals become changes, etc.
Modern music on the radio is most often not derived from live work, where the band gets feedback , instead it is constructed piecemeal in a studio. Finally, and to the primary loss, the thousands of hours of interplay between the members does not happen as often, the stuff is made up by one or two people. Repeated plays via corrupted channels forced into specifically limited formats is the final blow. It has been known since the 30's that just play it again reduces the resistance, people end up "liking" the stuff.
Variation in timbre has also reduced over the past decades.
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It all went to hell after Dark Side of the Moon.
My theory.
Enjoy.
Total Recall had a decent plot. I guess the twist in Total Recall 2012 is going to be it really is a dream this time?
This is what I would expect to happen when people make music based on what has previously sold rather than making music as a form of personal artistic expression: I would expect convergence on a smaller and smaller family of sounds and lyrics that appeal to the maximum number of people with less and less individuality. I would argue that this largely defeats the purpose of having music created by humans for other humans. It turns it into a homogeneous product where the musicians themselves are ultimately interchangeable.
It's also why I feel that no self-respecting musician should spend too much time worrying about trying to sound like famous musician X. It's a waste of time because at best you might end up just sounding like the other guy. At worst, you'll think you sound like him but you'll really just sound like a pathetic knock off (which is what usually happens). And in either case, if people want to hear the other guy, they can go to his show and go buy his CD.
There's really no substitute for your own sound.
This isn't such a big surprise considering that only a few corporations own all of the radio stations. The corporations are doing here what they do with everything else. They found a few things which appeal to most people, diversity doesn't maximize profit, so they let that erode and they give us the same music over and over again the way the supermarket gives us the same 6 types of produce despite there being thousands of varieties.
I find that, increasingly, there are songs where there is so little actual content it makes the entire song irritating after about 1 minute of listening. I've heard several songs where the entire song consists of less than a dozen words, after the 12th time through I just want to shove kitting needles into my ears.
This just means music-as-entertainment has matured like many other modern technologies. Computer hard drives, the car interface (steering wheel/pedals/etc.), dishwashers, books.
Next up people will be complaining that Western books use only a couple hundred characters rather than the thousands they used to use.
(/sarcasm)
Almost all food is based on the same DNA which only only contains four base pairs, thus all food must taste the same.
You can't compare rolling stones and beethoven. Beethoven's works are much more complex than anything rolling stones made.
Rolling stones is simple, beethoven is complex.
Most progressive rock is complex and that's because it IS complex though it tends to make more of a show of it than Beethoven.
You're mixing up quality and complexity.
Rolling stones are non-complex and good.
Beethoven is complex and good.
Progressive rock is complex and everything from good to crap.
What did Grunge do that the garage rock bands of the 60s didn't? Besides sell millions of records.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If you get your music from your local ClearChannel station, or via American Idol / the Musical Industrial Complex, sure, you get homogenized pap. But there is good music out there. It's just not presented to you any more ... you've got to dig a bit. Go listen to a few local acts, or tune in when you watch a good indy flic (how I discovered Tom Waits).
It's out there and it's worth finding -- as much or more variety as there's ever been, but better hidden.
And if pop songs were three weeks long, there might be room for the kind of variation DNA has.
The thing with rap, though, is that most of the archetypal rap records loop pre-existing records, so Rapper's Delight is Chic's "Good Times" and so on. So musically it wasn't as new as all that. The cutting and scratching added something new, of course, and some DJs were cleverer than others at taking breaks and re-contextualising them such that they were something new (for example, a lot of the Public Enemy loops didn't use the main hook of the source record).
When I'm in old fogey mode, I find myself thinking nobody's made a big innovation -- as in, something that sounds unlike anything before, that's gone mainstream -- since... when?
I think drum'n'bass was a big one: I remember when things started coming out with those double-speed drum tracks, thinking I'd never heard anything like it before.
I think dubstep is another. It's got a feel to it that I've never heard before (quite different from Jamaican dub).
It's high time the non-electronic side of things stepped up with something that sounds new.
If you are a teacher, you will notice that many students are listening to Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Beatles, Eagles, and lots of old stuff. My own children even listen to the Homeworld soundtrack from the videogame.
What I never hear is students listening to Bieber, Spears, or other commercially famous artists of today. The youth do have a sense of taste after all.
Read TFA and I find it's argumentation is embarrasingly weak. Here's a summary:
1) Mathematics causes high dropout rate in the US
The author goes on a tirade some 6 paragraphs long about how math is that no.1 subject that causes people to fail high school. Great. So what? Suppose we cut math. Then the no.1 drop out subject will be Chemistry (or whatever). Will we continue cutting subjects until we have none that cause students to drop out of schools?
2) Low drop out rate in other countries does not matter
In the next paragraph the author addresses the fact that in other countries people don't drop out because of math at such a high rate without sacrificing content. His answer is - it doesn't matter. Not in these precise words, but seriously - look it up in the article for yourself.
3) Math we learn has no relationship to the kind of reasoning we need at work
Interesting argument. So what is the proof for that claim? Well, some psychologist said it. Great. Some other psychologist said the contrary.
4) A mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above
Again, so what? How many entry-level workers will need to be proficient with history, english literature, chemistry or geography? How about when they will want to move on beyond the entry-level? How did you get that number anyway?
5) There's no evidence that learning math makes you a better thinker
Or in his words - " there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x + y) = (x - y) + (2xy) leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis." (no actual citations of studies how math helps or doesn't help thinking are provided). Oh my, this is so wrong! How would you measure the 'credibility of political opinions'? Why would you even want to measure it. Just because your political opinion is credible it does not have to be good! This where I should invoke the Goodwin law and be justified in it!
6)The doctors and veterinarians don't need math
This is getting silly. Would you have the educational system only teach the lowest common denominator for all jobs? What would it be? Basic English?
That's it for his arguments. Now what about all the arguments he didn't address:
1) Math teaches rigorous thinking. And it's probably the simplest tool to do so - it's very easy to verify and (on a High-School level) it's indisputable.
2) Math teaches to follow procedure - again - it's a very effective tool for that
3) Math trains you in critical thinking - teaches you to look for proofs in a controlled environment where proofs exist.
None of these arguments is properly examined in the article as the author fails to proceed (1) through critical examination (3) in a rigorous way (2).
More "primitive" music might indeed be the same, after all, if we are talking about the same thing, it is meant to sweep people up into a trance. Whether you do it for fun or to experience "god", the tech is the same.
But there has always been commercial music, music designed to easily fit into a slot. Just that it has become easier and easier to make music so we experience far more. I got music on almost every waking moment thanks to mp3 players. Something you just couldn't do before (I am old enough to have had the original walkman) because the headphones hurt or batteries ran out or you got sick to death of the tape you had with you.
And another part is, music you don't like, sounds alike. Because you don't like it, you don't bother regonizing it. People who hate classical music say that it all sounds the same. Same with Jazz etc etc.
After all, the classic guitar is MEANT to only play a few chords, it is a ritme instrument, not a "musical" instrument, you are supposed to listen to the song, not the guitar (in country western at least).
But go look beyond the pop charts and you can still find all types of music being created. So if there are more types of musics being made, how can variation go down? People still make "classical", Jazz, country western and god knows what else. It is not always easy to find but it is there.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
From TFA:
Songs today are on average 9 decibels louder than half a century ago, confirming what industry types have long suspected: that record labels engage in a "loudness race" in order to catch radio listeners’ attention. Since digital audio formats max out at a certain decibel level, as the average loudness inches towards that ceiling, songs will lose dynamic range, becoming ever more uniform.
This neglects to mention the ubiquitous use of compression to restrict dynamic range. In the 1950s, tube amplification in receivers, PAs and guitar amplifiers meant that if you turned these up loud, you overdrove the output stage and the output volume plateaus. That is, tubes have built-in compression if driven hard. As rock got louder in the 60s this compression became an essential part of the lead guitarist's sustain for rock guitar sounds. We got used to this loud evenness. In the 1980s, solid state technology dominated but studios were using electronic analog compression to impart a sense of energy to tunes (they were also using DBX Expanders to add "sizzle") and ensure radio broadcasts were at an even loud volume. With digital technology in recording studios, music now tends to just quote and modify these sounds that were developed on analog instruments and became established as the idiom we call "rock". This has been part of the idea of postmodernity since the 1980s. Change in music usually in born at the community level ie folk, blues, jazz, rock, techno, hiphop etc all arose as community art forms.
There is a great breadth to modern music that can't be quantified as chords and notes. There are many interesting sounds and arrangement in pop music and modern(ish) genres such as house music. Dynamic range compression makes everything "flatter", I'll give them that. Still, they are focussing on only a few parameters, and drawing general conclusions.
"rap music" is music with a significant rapping component. Which should be obvious. If you don't like "rapping" you won't like music from any genre that has significant amounts of it.
More accurately it's just another name for hip-hop, but hip-hop includes elements that aren't rap and so that's not a great definition (though it's the original one).
01001001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110111 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111010 01100101 01110010 01101111 01110011 00100001
MP3s, at a sufficiently high bitrate, are indistiguishable from CDs. They were doing this loudness war crap well before iTunes came along; it started back in the 90s. The real reason is they wanted songs to sound louder on the radio. It's just like how TV commercials are louder, so that people will pay more attention to them; songs on the radio are really advertisements for those songs, so they got the bright idea to compress the music to boost the apparent loudness to make their song sound louder than the other songs. Of course, they all started doing it pretty soon.
No, they are not. Ultimately, MP3 is a flawed format, as it is very old. If you know what to look for in the stereographic image of an MP3 with your ears, you will definitely hear the difference, no matter what the bitrate. This myth needs to be cleared out! MP3 sucks compared to some more modern codecs like AAC, OGG or others, which actually can be quite close to the original CD with high enough bitrates (300+).
Do the research! With MP3 the sound has a general sound to it, for example the hihats can be really easily distinguished from the raw cd counterparts if one has decent enough ear/brain system and hardware to listen with.
GeoKone.NET
The most fun I've ever had in a car was to put on Ride of the Valkyries really loud and roll down the windows after some Rap playing , Bass Thumping teenager pulled up next to me at an intersection.
Well, that was the second most fun I've ever had in a car.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I've noticed this lately, particularly with LMFAO and Nikki Minaj. "Starships" sounds like three different songs, with none of the parts fitting each other musically or lyrically. And as an aside, she's a shit rapper, rhyming words with themselves or not rhyming at all.
Same with LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem". The instrumental part after the chorus has nothing to do with anything.
I'm sure there are other examples, but those two bug me the most.
Rolling stones is simple?
You've never tried to play a Keith Richards fill have you ?
I don't agree with the 4-chord criticism. You know you can take the 26 letters of the English alphabet and do a lot with it.
On the other hand, if you take only numbers 0 and 1, you only end up with interwebs and MS Office.
At least you can get laid with four chords.
They do a good job but they ripped it (unintentionally or not) from this guy's routine. Yes this is the Pachelbel's Canon rant. Pachelbel's Canon is a baroque piece that follows roughly the I V vi IV progression. And as shown in both videos, it's probably more correct to say it's the progressions being reused, and how that is key since it is redundantly obvious that chords like notes are more limited and are always reused. Or like letters in the alphabet... there are only 26 but they can make millions of words (in many languages) depending on how they are ordered, or their progression.
For anyone who this flies over, it is really quite simple. We have seven notes in the traditional western scale (sometimes called the ionian mode by music geeks). In grade school we first learn the musical scale as doe ray me fa so la tee doe. That's eight because we repeat the root (do'h). If we looked at a piano we can play starting from middle C, and get the same scale by playing the key for the C note, then D, E, F, G, A, B, C.
We can also play the scale using chords instead of individual notes, and this is key to understanding progressions. But if we want to play the scale using chords for the C scale (called the harmonized scale), each chord needs to be made up of notes from only the C scale. If we played a harmonized scale in D, the notes of every chord would all need to belong to the D scale. This happens to work not too badly with a couple of minor (small pun here) changes. To keep it short, another important concept is that often the scale is enumerated. The first note of any scale is 1, the second 2. Usually this is done in Roman numerals. So a C in the C scale is I, the B is ii, the E is iii, the F is IV, the G is V, the A is iv, and the B is viib5 (the last one, minor seven flat 5 is a bit messed up, yeah). The upper and lower case is important, because upper case means a major or dominant chord and the lower case means minor.
We use the roman numerals because they can just be moved around to any scale. Say D, where the scale is D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D. So I, V, vi, IV as in Pachelbel's Canon, or the Axis of Awesome's Four Chords, is D, A, Bm, and G. Since you know it's I, V, vi, IV you can move it to the key of C and play C, G, A, F. If you were playing blues, the most common progression is I, IV, V (so you'll hear people saying, "hey, it's just one four five", and then often the key). You can hear a musician at a jam sometimes say, "there is a I, vi, ii, V turnaround." A very common turnaround and a type of progression.
So it is these chord progressions (encoded in roman numeral notation) that are really important not so much the chords. Take for example the progression: I, III, IV, iv... That is the first four bars of Radiohead's Creep. But it is also the first four bars of a 1920s Bessie Smith tune called 'Ain't Nobodies Business; covered very successfully later on by Jimmy Witherspoon, BB King and Ruth Brown(key of Bb), and the BOMB, Freddie King (key of Db... with a I, vi, ii, V turnaround :).... and borrowed by Radiohead (no turnaround... and nothing wrong with using the progression, like the article points out, there is limited set of progressions that sound good to people, their going to be reused).
To try to explain the reason for major and minor in a short space (it is is dense but should be understandable if you have even a little musical knowledge): Remembering the C scale is C, D, E, F, G, A, B: The first note is C
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
This is mostly due to production and songwriting becoming more of an iterative process than it used to be.
When composing on a piano, you can completely change an arrangement, the tempo, the feel and the harmonic structure in milliseconds. This leads to bold composition and considered arrangements. However, you are obviously very limited in timbre as it's a single instrument.
When working on a computer people tend to work by starting with a few simple parts, and tracking over them to build up an arrangement. So, you decide on what to add depending on what you already hear. It's easy to add lots of parts, but quite hard to change what each part is playing once it has been recorded, or to have an 'overview' of how you want it to sound before you start. This more iterative process tends to lead to more interesting timbres, but less interesting melodic and chordal variations.
I find most rock and pop to be repetition and boring, but out of every decade is a few really excellent, timeless songs. I like them because (I think) they are different, innovative, and stand out. Did this study examine this 1% of songs for comparison or just mash all of pop and rock together so that the good ones are drowned out by the junk?
Rolling stones is simple? You've never tried to play a Keith Richards fill have you ?
Rolling Stones' music is very simple, compared to classical music. Even one of the stones would admit it.
The most complex music of the stones, is child's play compared to any decent classical piece.
Check this for instance, achieving something like this (complexity and perfection of execution) would mean a brain collapse to a popular musician. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXi5D366n7o
You can't compare rolling stones and beethoven. Beethoven's works are much more complex than anything rolling stones made.
Rolling stones is simple, beethoven is complex.
Most progressive rock is complex and that's because it IS complex though it tends to make more of a show of it than Beethoven.
You're mixing up quality and complexity.
Rolling stones are non-complex and good. Beethoven is complex and good. Progressive rock is complex and everything from good to crap.
Prog. Rock can't be compared to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart or Debussy, etc. work, not in complexity, neither in quality.
I was quite startled to discover how much better some CDs sound through (decent) headphones than through (ordinary hi-fi) loudspeakers. I don't even mean seriously expensive, just a $70 CD player and $30 headphones (not the "X-bass" type). Obviously you have to be in a quiet room, and actually *listen* to the music. The best example is the Rachmaninov Vespers/Cleobury where the really deep bass (mezzo-piano) is so much easier to hear.
Incidentally, MP3 is fine, but it depends on the original recording AND the player. The iPod (at least the 1st gen) has serious artefacts when playing back high-bitrate mp3s.
Everything I've read about frequency response is that 90+% of 'fairly good' headphones are still pretty lousy at reproducing 20kHz sounds. They start losing response that high(takes more power to make the sound at the right energy level). Heck, 90% of headphones that advertise that they go that high are outright lying(per my sources). And you're correct about the sub - but I'm willing to still consider the possibility of a 10hz tone being used occasionally for a bit of music; sure, it's more 'special effect' at that point, but it's still 'art'(though I might not agree with it if used excessively).
Thus the comment about 'expensive' if you want to exceed CD quality.
There's a reason I specified 90% of music as well - most forms today are engineered to be within those limits. Classical is a notable exemption, but it's not even really 'designed' to be reproduced by electric equipment. It's intented to be experienced in some sort of listening hall(Generally).
I don't read AC A human right
But everybody knows that the appereciation of bebop is much enhanced by a nice spliff, and the late Beethoven string quartets are amazing on acid.
Bah, such lawsuits are far too sporadic
So what steps should a songwriter take to avoid ending up being the one that some major music publisher tries to make an example of in court?
they have an abysmal success rate (most are thrown out)
As I understand it, it takes a lawyer to get a lawsuit thrown out. The cost of a legal defense is why I said "doesn't want to get sued" rather than "doesn't want to lose a lawsuit".
This article might as well be subtitled "music was better in my day, get off my lawn."
I can see this used by a zillion smug people all smirkily saying "see? Those stupid masses with their pop music. They're all so dumb."
But it's way more complicated than that.
Yes, it's louder than 50 years ago. The loudness wars are to thank for those last few decibels. But the first several? Since 1960, recording tech and recording practice changed a LOT. Even before the modern loudness wars there was a big rise in loudnesses. So that's not news.
Music composition has changed though, too. And not just "duuuh it gots dumber." That would be, to put it bluntly, a gross oversimplification. In the late 70's pop music started embracing minimalism, and genres like techno, trance and house went whole hog into it. A lot of modern pop music ahs embraced the electronic dance music scene, and thus has really embraced minimalism, so...yeah, you're not going to see a lot of chord changes or crazy modal work. But it doesn't imply anything beyond a more minimalist structure.
The timbral thing surprises me, though. 50 years ago they weren't using synthesizers much. Now they are, and the sonic palatte is wide-open. So I'm not sure why, exactly, that it'd show up as less timbrally varied.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Did they have to study to find that out?
90% of all music, prog or not, is ... [complete this sentence]
the music industry pumps out garbage to numb your senses. entertainers that drone and moan. no talent, can't even compare to the 80's music. really horrible chit today man. insults the intelligence. can not tolerate. no talent having, hoes. music/entertainment biz is about pimps and hoes, i'm sorry, but that's just the way it goes. most of your artists today are actors playing like they are musicians. WTF? FUCK HOLLYWOOD!
Check out http://www.thatsongsoundslike.com/ for a ton of great soundalike examples!