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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!).
A 3dB increase represents twice as much "power", but the human ear does not perceive the increase in quite the same way. About 10 dB is perceived as "twice as loud."
Eh.. Only four bases used in your DNA. What's your point?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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
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.
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.
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 !
It's what you get used to.
A well calibrated home theater can be much quieter than that if you do not listen to louder music all the time.
As the blind person's other senses get more powerful the same thing will happen with your hearing.
If you cut back on your sugar intake by 80%, you will be amazed how overly sweet everything is. 85% dark chocolate starts to taste like milk chocolate after a while and milk chocolate tastes like a bar of pure sugar dusted with chocolate.
You do not need to have your shirt moved by the sound of explosions in an action movie.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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
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.
Of course it works backwards, if you get the maths right. ;) 3dB is half-power, not 1/8th power.
But I submit that a 3dB difference is indeed very audible. It is exactly the same difference as using an amplifier that is twice (or half) as powerful.
I work with audio and routinely tweak things on the order of 0.5-.25dB, and routinely do blind (not double-blind) comparisons in the course of my work. I find that these small adjustments are identifiable, though it involves careful listening (which is something I've trained my brain to be able to do over a couple of decades). A 1dB change, on the other hand, is garish in its obviousness (to me).
That all said: Of course lowering the volume by 3dB is going to decrease the amount of hearing damage you receive: The more you use your ears, the worse they get. Lowering it by 10dB will help even more. Living in a world with your ears stuffed with earplugs will help reduce hearing damage from environmental sounds dramatically.
It's somewhat of a slippery slope.
Balancing hearing damage with enjoyment is really not a mathematical problem, but more something spiritual: You only live once, and death is inevitable. IMHO: If it's fun to turn it up occasionally, do so. When it stops being fun, stop doing so. If you're concerned about having the most perfect hearing that is practical and want memories of always being astutely careful on your deathbed, then don't turn it up. Ever.
If you'd rather have fond memories of social events and fun times that involve loud music when you die, then give the knob a clockwise twist when it's fun, and enjoy. And then turn it back down when the fun stops, which might be minutes or hours later, so you've got some left for the next time it seems fun.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
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
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.
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
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? :)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.........
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.