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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?
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
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!).
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
Eh.. Only four bases used in your DNA. What's your point?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
>> "Million Song Dataset has concluded that modern music has less variation than older music"
You have successfully preserved the "IP".
--whacky
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.
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.....
Youngster. Most of Status Quo's repertoire was three or four chords, but they played them insanely well.
A good example of a popular song that uses just three chords and a single note for the main melody is "Ça Plane Pour Moi" (and it's variety "Jet Boy, Jet Girl" which uses an excess of two notes for the melody).
And minimalists like Kraftwerk, of course.
But then at the other end of the spectrum, you have music like Mike Oldfield or Vangelis that can use dozens of chords, counterpoints, and an enormous frequency range with both timpani and walking treble, yet sounds simplistic.
And then you have symphonic rock like Yes, Pink Floyd, Genesis and King Crimson which sounds awfully complicated, but seldom is. Five chords is pretty standard, but shifts between major and minor, tempo shifts and synth embellishments makes it sound a lot more complex than it really is.
But yeah, music from the oughties tends to be on the simpler side no matter how you look at it. In-your-face with little or no dynamics, a substantial lack of treble, and the lyrics being more important than the melody. And that's just fine - people have different tastes, and the pendulum will sooner or later swing back again.
If you play Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh, I think you would have a hard time making that claim. And that's not even comparing him to Mozart or Wagner.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And a script that sends DMCA takedown notices to itself because the new song sounds similar to something old.
c++;
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.
...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'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.
I bet it'll be even worse a decade from now.
Yes, and no thanks to MAFIAA
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
here are four of them!!
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
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 ;-)
Submitter here: RTFA!!! The point is that music has become measurably more similar over the last 50 years.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
If you play Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh, I think you would have a hard time making that claim. And that's not even comparing him to Mozart or Wagner.
Or compare Hendrix to the Foo Fighters, Both rock, both very different. Even with Hendrix, compare Little Wing to All Along the Watch Tower to Star Spangled Banner. Very different styles of music from the same artist. With the Foo Fighters, compare Aurora to Stacked Actors or Generator, very different songs and they're on the same album.
I'm yet to see that kind of variety from Beyonce, Jay Z or Katy Perry. Hell even the likes of Slipknot have more variety and I think Slipknots music sounds very similar (to be fair, they do live in a niche of metal).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
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
All music is converging until it consists of single, steady tones.
Heard a great song today. It was B flat for three minute.
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo....
It rocks!
I bet it'll be even worse a decade from now.
Yes, and no thanks to MAFIAA
Almost certain to be true if this goes on and for precisely the same reason that this is occurring in the motion picture field. Anything new, or even just mildly different, involves risk and this is just as true when we are changing business models. Entrenched players are, justifiably, terrified of change so they oppose it with every fiber of their being and using any convenient weapon to beat back the threat. This is true of most of humanity as a rule, otherwise most of us would not be social beings, and we are very social. [aside: Well, maybe not this crowd but hell, we are socializing here.] We've already seen this play out in Hollywood. As the monetary investment significantly increased, the amount of acceptable risk allowed in most any project has decreased significantly. I'm surprised that no one else has noticed the trend. Then again, if a few thousand musicologists make this point, non-experts don't pay attention. If a computer says this, it might actually mean something.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Aren't these things real complexity to you? Why not? Not any mode shift, tempo shift or synth embellishment is equally good. Discovering post rock I've gained an appreciation for just how much you can do with just dynamics.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Only 4 atoms in most chemistry.
Great Intellect...
Without checking the TFA, I'd say, at least with more traditional pop songs, it all stems from the fact that certain keys are far easier to play with guitar than the others.
The most popular keys are majors A, E, C, G, and D. Take four basic chords in any of these, you end with
A D E F#m
E A B C#m
C F G Am
G C D Em
D G A Bm
So we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B majors and C#, E, F#, A, and B minors. That makes 13. Add Dm, and you cover most used minor keys, although pop music usually uses major chords (combined with minor melodies).
Some of these minor chords are probably pretty rare, and on the other hand the usual range of singers is another restricting factor. I actually don't listen to pop music enough to rememeber how this affects.
Minimalism? Or maybe just variation?
Minimalism has a deeply hipster heritage. Sometime late in the 16th century some clever guy observed, "Hey, look! In the past they made complex, ponderous music in line with the ponderous, complex architecture and interior decoration that was in style that day. Today, we prefer simpler, smoother lines in our rococco chairs, and what do you know, we prefer simpler, more elegant music as well! Maybe music reflects the society we live in?"
Then for a hundred years or so, composers veered a bit between making music that unconsciously reflected the times and societies they lived in - because it sounded nice to them - and making music that deliberately was supposed to reflect society. At the times, nationalism was big, and the popular music of the time was embraced (and somewhat set in stone, as the notion of what "real" Czech, Norwegian or Romanian music should sound like).
Then eventually, some people thought they could get a shortcut to fame by not only consciously aiming at the music that reflects society, but aiming at the music that would be popular in the future. (This was probably fueled by the historicist doctrines of e.g. Marxism, which asserted that scientific prediction of the path of history/evolution of society was possible). Mostly they made horrible music which, when the future came around, didn't really get all that popular. It scraped by, at least economically, by appealing to an increasingly fashion-conscious upper class.
Now popular music had moved along - the bit of it that had been set in stone as "folk music" by romantic theorists was still around, but much of it had kept moving too, and thus we got modern popular music. Modern popular music was disliked by music theorists, because it didn't fit into their theories, and thus it was derided as simple and primitive (never mind that the folk music they idolized 30 years ago was simple in exactly the same ways).
But other theorists kept wanting to predict the next big thing. They figured that if pop music reflected society, then it would soon have a parallel in the visual arts. If they could kickstart that style based on this intuition, they would be famous. Thus, Pop Art was born. Since it was the product of a highly intellectual academic tradition, it was in many ways as far from pop music as you could get, and it didn't really get very noticed.
But it stuck around for a while, and then something bizarre happened: some other theorists discovered it, and were unaware of its origins as a conscious effort derived from pop music. They thought, hey, this visual art style is up and coming, it reflects the society that's on its way - but it doesn't have a parallel in music. We can get famous if we get there first! And thus Minimalism was born.
The Pop Art theorists had a pretty condescending view of popular music, so they made their installations/works simple and primitive. The Minimalists faithfully made this into a simplistic and somewhat primitive form of music. Popular music two steps removed.
The amazing thing is that somewhere along the path, they stopped taking themselves so damn seriously, and actually made some music that's interesting in its own right. Which is pretty much unique among the over-theorised "classical" music of the 20th century.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Hey, Beyonce's music shows a great deal of variation! She covers all themes from "I strong independent woman and I gots my man but why he not put ring on muh finger?" through to "We honeys be single confident woman dancing and whooping, and 'aint gon be needin' no man to put a ring on us fingers". The music itself is just as varied and interesting as her lyrics.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
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.
Pachelbel's Canon has eight notes...
No sig today...
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.
So the vuvuzelas at the World Cup were just ahead of their time, eh? :)
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... ?
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.
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.
Those aren't chords. They're keys and their relative minors.
And look what he did with eight notes compared to most of the garbage today.
I think on average your run of the mill pop star has no music education and what the do know, they picked up from guitar tabs. In other words, route learning. They have no understanding of the music's structure and theory.
Sad, because I expect a lot of them could be so much better than they are if they understood what the hell they were doing.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
After riding with my son in his truck and being subjected to "Pop Metal", Whatever TFTI that is, the singers have a range of 1 note, which is a monotonic screeching somewhere between a donkey being molested by Jerry Sandusky and an elephant giving birth.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"This time"? Verhoeven has explicitly said he made the movie so that either interpretation was possible and that neither was actually *correct*.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
In other words, due to old age you are unable to hear the higher frequencies that pop-metal singers squeal at.
I think you are talking about Death Metal. The musicians aren't bad and if they would just shut the f-ck up, they'd have some decent instrumentals there. The uni-note alleged singers are pretty awful. Even Rob Halford from Judas Priest has started singing that way now that his voice no longer has the range it once did. It is kind of funny watching the Death Metal musicians "sing" about violence when they'd get their asses kicked were they ever in a street fight.
That all could be true, or big label song writers are just getting lazier.
Not sure how we got on Total Recall, but I'll take the version with Sharon Stone.
I expect I have better high frequency hearing than your average Metal fan simply due to the volume at which they listen to their music.
I buy stock in hearing aid companies.
Clint Eastwood should do a movie with the line "Turn that damn music down".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Who knows...I just ask, "What the hell is that?"
I changed the station to something more musical...like Led Zeppelin.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Well they are making music for the musically uneducated consumer, if I'm to take the free market libertarian stance that is so prevalent here. Me? I'm a part-time professional musician trained at university. Sometimes "dumb" music can sound good, but usually not. I like "smart pop", but even it's a dying breed.
expect a lot from them ? Really ? think about it, if you make small adjustments and selll the same music (or seems different but it's not) and you still make a fortune and it's working why change anything ? This might sound very negative or insulting but it's because people buy the same music that the music industry keep selling the same music after all. Why change the recipe when that same recipe is making millions in profit...you gotta be an idiot to change that. Just wait till the people stop buying the same music and problaby things will change but given the last stats. The recipe is really simple and the music industry got it figured out. Change the artist and some notes here and there and voila, you got yourself a superstar for a year or 2...maybe more it he/she shows some talent.
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.
Even minimalistic pop chords have at least three notes per chord, so it's more like 12 or 16 vs. 26. Then there's how you play them...strummed, arppegiated, pizzacattoed, slurred together...that's just the style of evoking the notes, then there's the order they are played in, the style, the voice, the timbral quality, etc. etc. etc.
In English, only certain letter combinations are valid. In music there is no such limitation, so you can do far more with fewer combos.
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.
Who knows...I just ask, "What the hell is that?"
I changed the station to something more musical...like Led Zeppelin.
I don't much like anything with unintelligible words, which greatly limits the modern metal I listen to.
The internet is almost dead at work (I suspect something to do with the Olympics...) but I like:
- Týr: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I1geB7U5VI
- Subway to Sally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY-R7EeI7yw
- Skyclad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVJkVCWXe9Q
This is all (broadly) folk metal, and unfortunately isn't very popular outside Germany and Scandinavia
Don't get me started on Rap.
Someone please mod this off topic. We're talking about music.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Route learning? "First play this, walk to the center of the stage, play that, kneel, play the other thing, stand up, go back to the bassist and play this again." Or do you mean "rote learning"?
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
But it matters what you can do with them.
Hell, AC/DC has made a lot of great music, and a long career with many fans...using only about 3 chords per song.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ever heard 4'33"?
Has anyone?
So do I, however, I must strongly recommend you check out the unparalleled Hayseed Dixie. For my money, there's no better classic-rock-done-bluegrass than these guys.
"Pachelbel's Canon has eight notes..."
Try doing a 4-voice canon with more, and making it listenable by anyone who isn't tone-deaf. Good luck.
Plus, it must be said that those notes are played in different octaves, at different times, by different instruments.
Most modern music can't even stretch high enough to kiss its ass.
I don't think anyone's ever heard 4'33".
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.
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.
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.
It seems that you have discovered dark ambient?