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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.

12 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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

  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. 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 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
    2. 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. Technology isn't killing music by CeasedCaring · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's Simon Cowell's job.

  5. 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