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Ask Slashdot: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

Posted by Soulskill on from the riker's-trombone-suggests-otherwise dept.

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.

28 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No. No it won't.

    1. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by TWX · · Score: 2

      Are you joking? Technology has always disrupted the nature of music. Early forms of recording were very short in duration and essentially dictated the time lenggh of their contents. Popular music has had to conform to the technology, and arguably is permanently changed. How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by geekmux · · Score: 3, Funny

      Are you joking? Technology has always disrupted the nature of music. Early forms of recording were very short in duration and essentially dictated the time lenggh of their contents. Popular music has had to conform to the technology, and arguably is permanently changed. How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?

      Uh, let's not use time as a measure or indication of quality or intent, shall we?

      I'm a bit too afraid that the attention span of today will start handing out Oscars for Vine videos.

    3. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by sound+vision · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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. Donovan had to make a decision when recording "Hurdy Gurdy Man" whether to include all 3 verses he wrote, or 2 verses and a guitar solo, as there wasn't time to have 3 verses plus a solo within 3 minutes. The Byrds had loads of songs where even more verses were cut out to keep them down to a radio-friendly length. 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.

      As for how streaming services will affect music - I think a lot of the pressures they put on writers are similar to radio. They work better with shorter pieces of music that are free-standing in the sense that they will work when played between any two other songs. So, less emphasis on things like thematic consistency (both in lyrics and music). Really the only thing I see different in streaming (vs. radio) is that in streaming it's easier to skip a particular song, so the listener is able to shut himself out more from experimentation. He can decide within 15 seconds if a song presents a sound he deems to be acceptable, and whether he wants to skip it. Whereas on the radio, he would be "forced" to listen to the whole track. I don't think this will be much of an issue though, since radio stations as well as streaming services both usually cater to a specific genre anyway - they're certainly not hotbeds of experimentation.

    4. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      Disrupt no, change yes and it always will. Globalization will also change it.
      When they started to make drums they found a way to make music louder so it can be heard hundreds of meters away. So music changed.
      Additional instruments created new sound so the singer wasn't always needed. Then we have forms where the singer emulates the sound of the instrument.
      We get to the point were instruments can be fine tuned then music can be played as written allowing wider distribution of music.

      Streaming will change music, being that the artist are not bound by media lengths. They can have a short 30 second song or a 3 hour long song.

      Also the fact that music is now listen more privately over headphones, increases the music diversity, you don't need to feel guilty that after some heavy metal music you can switch to music theater without people looking at you funny.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    5. Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by RDW · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I don't think it's an arbitrary cut (at least not until you get to, say, Wagner, where selections really do tend to look like 'bleeding chunks'). In earlier operas, there's usually a pretty clear distinction between recitative and aria, not that much different to the songs in a musical today (or even the singles from a 'concept album'). Of course you can argue that composers with a bit of business sense had an eye on the technology of the time - popular arias were sold individually as sheet music, and later as records - I've seen the 78 described (in the LP era) as 'still the ideal medium for a Puccini-length aria'. Puccini died in 1924, and many of his arias were the early hits of the gramophone. Short-form music has always been popular, though. How many popular folk songs go on for more than 5 minutes? In church music, the choir may tackle longer form works, but the hymns the congregation sings generally aren't much longer than a pop single.

    6. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 2

      A lot of the longer songs also had "chopped" versions that were used for radio play. Especially if they had long drum solos or the like.

      Although Attention Deficit Disorder is pretty much the order of the day these days, even back in simpler times, pop radio favored short songs over longer ones. If a particular number didn't amuse the listener, then keeping them short ensured that the listener would be less likely to switch to a different station, since the chances of something more agreeable coming along shortly were relatively high. Conversely, if your station is broadcasting the "Ring of the Nibelungs", then you'd darn well better be interested in the Nibelungslied, since you're in it for the long haul.

      One thing that has disappeared over the last few decades is album-oriented play and its close relative, the late-night "album hour". That's where longer words such as the Dark Side of the Moon, Bob Dylan's extended ballads and Inna Gada Da Vida were most likely to be heard.

    7. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    8. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by TWX · · Score: 2

      How many of these pop songs caused the initial promotion of the band, in the long form, versus a truncated radio-play form? Most of these songs were distributed after their respective bands/artists were already popular, and once one is popular, one has more leeway to experiment.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    9. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by cayenne8 · · Score: 2

      I get what you're saying, but this IS the problem with defining an artist these days. Money is THE priority. When that happens, the ability to express yourself beyond a mathematically calculated attention span becomes impossible.

      I agree. A true artist makes their art for themselves FIRST and enjoys the fact that others like it too second.

      Of course with rock music, it also plays to helping ugly guys get laid too, but that's another thread.

      But in most cases, trying to pander to the money or follow it over art is in the not very long term a failure.

      Take Led Zeppelin. Sure they made a LOT of money, but that didn't seem the reason for their musical choices. It was what THEY wanted to explore and convey. It happened to be of such quality that they sold a lot of it, and continue to do so after all these years.

      They also went out and gave the people what they wanted in the form of live performances. In those days, your ticket got you usually nearly a 3 hour concert, and it wasn't lip synched....no auto tune, and often it was improvised on the spot. Sure you would get some flub notes....especially with Jimmy trying to squeeze 50M notes into two bars at times, but hey...they gave you all they could. You don't see that much anymore.

      But if you are good, you will get the money....but your art should be for YOU first, and if it is worthy the crowd will follow and pay you for it.

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    10. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by KGIII · · Score: 2

      The Doors were the ones to pretty much break the two minute barrier. Songs two minutes long were pretty much all that got radio play. They broke that because they had music people wanted to hear even though it was longer than two minutes. Short songs is not new. Densmore discusses it in his book and it is discussed in the book The Doors though I have forgotten the author's name - the one with the yellow and red cover with a bad depiction of Jim on it.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    11. Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      However I have to point out that this renewed focus on short songs is strange, being that going back to the beginning of 20th century pop music, songs were regularly 2-3 minutes in length.

      Definitely true. I was mostly responding to GP, who was arguing about how songs are artificially shortened.

      But you're absolutely right that short songs have a long history too, though again there are limits. There are plenty of songs in the 2-3 minute range, but very few less than 2 minutes. And, aside from "novelty songs" (or very fast tempo songs) and advertising jingles and such, songs less than 60-90 seconds are exceptionally rare.

      Thus, I find TFA's discussion of the possibility of artists replacing a 3-minute song with six 30-second songs to be rather silly -- unless all pop music is going to become advertising jingles. Sure, it's fun to watch a particularly good 30-second commercial a few times, but you're not going to listen to it hundreds of times, as many do with pop songs they love.

      On the flip side we have a band like Rush that has consistently created longer songs that "remain interesting" and usually don't adhere to the AABA song structure.

      Long songs certainly CAN be done. But except for my folk ballad examples of songs with 50 verses, the only other way to do it in a simple way is to cobble together contrasting sections, with each section being a few minutes long. Effectively, you create a piece like a classical work with "movements," a la Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or many of Rush's longer pieces.

      If you want to sustain a longer piece without just chaining a bunch of contrasting blocks ("movements") together, it gets harder. There are certainly solutions, both in the pop world and historically in classical music (e.g., 15-minute-long "sonata form" movements of classical symphonies by Beethoven or Brahms are often just vastly expanded and complex variations on AABA forms).

      And certainly AABA is not the ONLY form in the world. I was just using it as an example because it's so common and displays some of the characteristics among various song organization types (i.e., repetition/return/variation and contrast).

      But all good points.

  2. Shut your whore mouth! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios,

    WHAT?! What a corruption of the traditions of our country's musical heritage. Give me the organic groups-- the Monkees, Menudo, One Direction, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, NKOB, the Spice Girls.. you know, talented musicians who found each other and came together through the music.

    1. Re:Shut your whore mouth! by narcc · · Score: 4, Funny

      You might notice that most of the artists you named here were terrible.

      FTFY

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
  3. Meh by penguinoid · · Score: 2

    Corporations will continue to make boatloads of money, artists will continue to sell their work for a song.

    --
    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
  4. Already has by GrahamCox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.

    1. Re:Already has by geekmux · · Score: 2

      The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.

      Yeah.

      It would be a shame to allow shitty encoding to ruin the beautiful sounds of an Autotuned voice.

    2. Re:Already has by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's more a result of auto-tune and the loudness war. Actually this whole thing started in the late 80s, with 1990 being about the tipping point.

      Before 1990 people tended to write lyrics and then set them to music. The music was built around what the vocalist could sing, because clearly the lead can only make one sound at a time and has to breathe from time to time. Then sampling became popular and people started to sample and layer up vocals, stitching them together in a way that no vocalist could repeat in real life, and applying effects to them.

      People who sing will be familiar with this, especially if they do a lot of covers of popular songs (e.g. karaoke). A lot of post 1990 stuff is very hard to do live, if not impossible.

      Later we got auto-tune. That lets people do ridiculous things with their voices, because they can hit notes effortlessly and it becomes more like playing an instrument than actually singing. Add the loudness war in and you get lots of distortion and ringing added into the vocal mix. Real time effects are standard too.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    3. Re:Already has by sound+vision · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I wouldn't say technology has made music un-singable. Yeah, there are some tracks out there with vocals layered using a sampler. But you've had layered vocals since the dawn of time in the form of duets and harmony singing in larger groups. Effects like chorus and reverb can be pretty much ignored when singing - lots of them are just used to replicate the sound of a particular physical environment. Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung. Complaining that you can't make the sound coming out of your mouth sound identical to what you hear on a record is a bit of a ridiculous comparison... it's a bit like saying you can't sing Yesterday unless your voicebox is an exact 1:1 mold of Paul McCartney's.

    4. Re:Already has by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung.

      Correcting a singer who can't hold a specific pitch is expanding their vocal range! Maybe from zero to something, but still.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Already has by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      What I mean is that, for example, often one line ends and the next begins too fast for any normal person to breathe. Rap has some extreme examples of this. I recall a live performance by Eminem a few years ago where he sang most of each line but then had someone else cover the last couple of words so that he could get enough oxygen for the next line.

      There is a lot of other marginal stuff that can be sung but you need to re-arrange the music a fair bit for it to sound good. That's one of the reasons why karaoke versions are often re-arranged rather than the original version. When the original is available it is usually an older pre-1990 song.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    6. Re:Already has by fermion · · Score: 2
      Rock and roll came out the ability to overdrive amplifiers, electrical then electronic.

      The crooning typical of music prior to that came about through the ability of microphones to pick up nuances in tone. Prior to this it was just a bunch of guys playing and singing as loudly as they could to try to get the sound recorded on wax.

      The last major fight over the structure of music was 30 years ago when everyone was fighting over the right to sample. This, by and large, was due to the fact that for the first time we had a large archive of high quality recording, and the the technology to mix old and new to create a significantly different product.

      I suspect that this revolution will be similar. The structure of music has changed. It has gone from an album format, in which most consumers buy and listen to a compilations of songs, to an a la carte format where listeners buy, or more often just stream, a selected song. This has minimized the importance of creating a cohesive album. While every album had one or two radio songs released as singles, most artists tried to make it part of a whole.

      In the future I think software will make it possible to string parts of songs together to make something like a dance mix. Some radio DJS used to do this before it was all computer controlled. So like the album losing it status as the definitive unit, the song will also be a legacy concept, artist getting paid royalties only if a part of the song can be structured to fit in a longer musical composition.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  5. Technology isn't killing music by CeasedCaring · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's Simon Cowell's job.

  6. Re:Music has been about tech for decades by geekmux · · Score: 2

    Most popular music was a result in changes in technology that allowed for new sounds. Elvis and The Beetles couldn't have made their sound a decade before due to differences in the technology of microphones, recording and playback equipment. The same is true for many of the groups that produced top hits and most major groups in the last 9 decades had a tehcnological edge over the music they replaced.

    So, this generation of "music" makers, armed with the best Autotune sound mixers and Photoshop artists, along with the algorithms that prove what RPM will drive the most money out of a background bass track, is proving exactly what today? That technology can replace the artist?

    Seriously, where do we go from here? How long before the musical overlords simply ask the computer to calculate the next beat and vocal pitch based on revenue?

    Enjoy technology. Don't worry though, hologram Elvis will be touring soon, and he'll sound better than he ever could while sporting six-pack abs.

  7. Re:don't forget by Chrisq · · Score: 2

    And don't forget that technology is a now a central part of how such music is created

    Thank you for the reminder! I did nearly forget!

    Its been that way since our distant ancestors found that banging a stick on a log was a great enhancement to just wailing

  8. I'm confused. by d'baba · · Score: 2

    When did it not?

  9. Learn Something Very Old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I dislike these medium.com articles as much as anybody, but there is a whopper of an Easter Egg in it.
    It's that picture at the top- bits of a Score written in some kind of Latin. (There are many kinds...)

    This comes from the commissioned, by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, work of one Florentius de Faxolis, a 15th century Priest and Musical Scholar.
    He had written a work on Music Theory for the Cardinal, on what makes _Good_ _Music_.
    I once read some of the Book, at Berkeley. It emphasized short pieces, repetition, and simple melodies. (I had to have my God-Daughter translate some of the more obscure parts. The Latin in the commentary was difficult.)

    It was written in Manuscript form; the only widely distributed printed edition is only five years old.
    http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674049437

  10. Re:Albums by sound+vision · · Score: 2

    Albums might become less important commercially, as far as many people will be buying individual tracks, not a whole CD. But when you look at what was released all throughout the CD era (and before), most albums were already just collections of standalone songs. The Pink-Floydian concept album was always the exception, not the norm. The norm was taking a half dozen songs that had in fact already been released as 45 rpm singles, padding them with some filler, and releasing it as an album.

    So looking at release schedules, you're probably right, artists might be more inclined to release smaller batches of tracks vs. waiting until they have enough material for an album. But as far as the music they're writing, I don't see that changing. People who cared about putting together an hour-long block of thematically consistent music before, will still care about that now. People who were going to write standalone "singles" will continue to do that, too.