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Ask Slashdot: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?
An anonymous reader writes: The music industry has gone through dramatic changes over the past thirty years. Virtually everything is different except the structure of the songs we listen to. Distribution methods have long influenced songwriting habits, from records to CDs to radio airplay. So will streaming services, through their business models, incentivize a change to song form itself? Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios, and the shift to digital is providing them with ever more data about what people like to listen to. And don't forget that technology is a now a central part of how such music is created, from auto-tune and electronic beats to the massive amount of processing that goes into getting the exact sound a studio wants.
Time is 100% relevant to this discussion. Music history is littered with examples of songs that have had their structure and duration altered as a result of outside forces. [snip] While radio stations aren't as anal about running times these days, you still won't hear a 10-minute song on the radio. And there's no disputing that that particular limitation had a deep effect on much of the music of the previous century.
Yes, and no. You're right that media constraints often try to keep songs shorter. But that doesn't imply that longer songs would be that common, even without those constraints.
Examine most of music history. Whether you're talking about 14th-century French chansons, 16th-century Italian madrigals, 18th-century independent arias, 19th-century German lieder, or 20th-century pop (or Broadway or jazz or...) -- ALL of those repertoires tend to have songs that average about 3-5 minutes in length, with some that might go 6-7 minutes, rare ones that are 7-10 minutes, and almost none more than 10 minutes. Individual movements of larger classical works often follow a similar pattern.
(The main exception are certain kinds of folk ballades or epic ballades which have many, many verses because they tell a long story. But in that case, the actual form of the music takes a "back seat" to the story -- essentially after the 5th or 6th verse, it's kind of a recitation formula which loses its musical impact. A related form is repetitive chanting, where the music becomes less important than the ritualistic experience of repeating the music again and again.)
It's surprising that TFA seems to be written by a songwriting professor, because he seems to understand little about these long-term trends and what they say about basic cognitive patterns that relate to musical structure.
Effective musical composition is really about balancing two things: repetition and novelty. That's it. Seriously. If you write a song that NEVER repeats a refrain or a musical phrase or a short "motive" of a few notes or even a basic rhythmic pattern, you end up with something that just sounds like "random notes." In fact, you have to work quite hard to write something that has no repetitive patterns at all. And it gives a listener a little pleasure in hearing something familiar again -- you "know how that part goes," and that recognition about how it sounds and how the phrase is going to play out is comforting and satisfying.
On the other hand, outside of dance music (again, a pattern going back roughly a thousand years for dance music), too much repetition makes a piece boring. If you keep playing the same few notes over and over again, it gets tedious.
Composers over the centuries have settled on a number of standard forms for putting together songs, because they effectively balance repetition and novelty -- often through varied repetition (or elements where one thing is repeated, like the harmony, but the melody over top of it is varied somewhat).
Lots of songs, for example, use a "song form" of AABA for verses. Why? Because the first time we hear A, it's unfamiliar and new. When we hear A again, it's a welcome repetition -- we get to feel like we "know how this goes." So why not do A a third time? Because it starts to get boring -- so we do a B section that contrasts and often introduces some drama/tension (or changes the feel or dynamics at least in some way). And then, to finish it off, we do a return to A (often with a little variation or a little shorter than the first time) -- which again satisfies because it's familiar... it kind of releases the tension introduced by the contrasting B.
That may be a structure for a verse, but entire songs often have a similar structure: verse-refrain-verse-refrain-BRIDGE-refrain, where each "verse-refrain" unit is kind of like a big "A," the bridge introduces contrast, and then the final return to the refrain (often transformed or at a higher energy level) provides a satisfying conclusion