This is all true, but go back to the ancestor post that spawned all this:
[Rock's] appeal musically (when you ignore the words) is a more primal emotion. Clasical period music was designed to express more complex set of emotions.
Clearly a huge chunk of rock/pop is three-chord-trick blues-derivative in 4-4, but even if that's 95%, the remaining 5% is significant.
Thanks for making my point and countering your own. Can we reduce or describe classical compositions in the same manner? Probably not. Classical compositions reach a complexity that is simply not describable nor reducible the way modern pop/rock is.
Well, we'd have to do some kind of survey. But my instinct is that 90% of classical music is 4/4, 3/4 ditties using conventional chord progressions in exactly the same way as 90% of pop music is. We can find exceptions on both sides, but they don't represent the mainstream on either side. Pachabel's Canon is no more sophisticated than A Whiter Shade of Pale although I suppose it has the distinction of doing it first.
You are deluding yourself. Hendrix's chordal structures are no different than any other blues artists' chordal structures. Blues is merely a simplification of Jazz. His structures are NOT complex by any stretch of the imagination... (root, 3rd, 5th, or root, minor 3rd, 5th... a diminshed 7th now and again... and precious little else)... To suggest that Hendrix's music is more complex or richer than Bach's is patently ridiculous, on its face.
I'll maintain that it's more harmonically complex than the popular Mozart works (you'll note I'm backing away from Bach as an example). He's introducing 9ths and diminished 4ths and many more "odd" intervals. I don't want to get into a "Hendrix was special" argument though. You're right, he was just playing blues well. *Lots* of blues musicians use more complex chords than Mozart's market allowed him.
A six string guitar is a very simple instrument, compared to, say, a piano or an orchestra. The guitar is actually quite limited... because of its construction, most songs will be composed in the major keys of G, D, E, or A, or their relative minors.
But complex compared to a 4 stringed violin, or a monophonic flute, so I don't really see your point. Good guitarists play in any key, by virtue of not using open strings. Crap guitarists can fake it with a capo. Creative rockers experiment with alternative tunings. Rock music is made on pianos too. And in groups ranging from two people to a full orchestra.
12/8? I don't think so. Perhaps I exaggerated a bit... but a counter-example doesn't make your point. So the majority is 4/4, with a minimum of songs in 3/4, and 5/4. And that's it. 3 signatures. But my point is made once you agreed that the vast majority is 4/4. Being that there are some counter-examples of pop songs in the other two signatures does not support the argument that modern pop/rock is richer or more musically complex than classical.Â
This is silly. The vast majority of classical music is in 4/4 or 3/4 too. You're talking as if the classical canon is full of wacky time signatures. The popular classical pieces we're talking about certainly aren't. The 7/8, 5/4, 9/8 songs are outliers in classical music just as they are in rock. And that the case because the audiences can't tap their foot to them.
12/8 is the standard "slow blues" signature (Fleetwood Mac's "Need your love so bad" and hundreds of similar songs).
Further, your infatuation with Radiohead likely has more to do with production than composition... Personally, I feel I can reduce Radiohead to its core: what makes Radiohead original is the drummer. And even moreso... the drummers obsession with constantly banging the cymbals. [...] From my perspective, IMHO, Radiohead's "sound" is merely the evolution or resurgence of the popularity of the "sound" of Liverpool/Manchester movements, like Oasis and Blur...
I dunno what Radiohead album you've been listening to. We can agree they have a good drummer though:)
I'm not sure whether you were writing in parody mode or not.
Clearly a huge chunk of rock/pop is three-chord-trick blues-derivative in 4-4, but even if that's 95%, the remaining 5% is significant.
I didn't mention Kid Rock, because that *would* be absurd. I mentioned Kid A, Radiohead's leap into avant-garde "post-rock", influenced by 20th century classical, jazz and electronica.
I don't really want to single out Hendrix, except as an *example* of someone using more complex chordal structures than yer Bachs and Mozarts.
And (in your followup) you don't know a single rock/pop song that's not in 4/4 you've simply not looked. *Loads* in 12/8, quite a few in 3/4. Rock songs in 5/4 are rare, but they do exist (easiest example: "Money" by Pink Floyd).
If you delve into the world of 1970s prog rock, you'll find all kinds of wild musical experimentation.
Obviously this conversation isn't doesn't merit my trawling through 50 years of post-rock'n'roll music finding the good stuff.
I attended a Welsh National Opera performance of Don Giovanni late last year, and I enjoyed it. But, it's the pop music of it's time and it is decidedly populist in its ambitions. Simple story. Nice tunes. Harmonious backing in straight major and minor chords. Job done.
Hendrix habitually threw 7ths, 9ths, augmented 4ths into his chords; intervals which (apart from possibly the occasional 7th) Mozart's audiences would never have tolerated.
I was careful to limit my claim to the "popular Bach, Mozart, Handel and Beethoven works", because I'm sure there were works of greater sophistication written in that period and maybe by those people. But their popular works are popular because they're populist. And what makes them populist is that they are unchallenging.
I am 31 tears old, and i really, really hate pop and rock... why am i subjected to it at each store?
I think the difference is that shops are private enterprises and are free to attract or deter potential customers with whatever ambience they see fit. If a trendy clothes shop wants to keep squares out with pounding R&B, so be it.
Depending on where you live, railways may or not be private enterprises -- but they're granted a monopoly by the local government, and they shouldn't be deterring any legitimate users. Yes: silence would be preferable.
Patronising, over-general and wrong, in my opinion.
Some rock and hip-hop is indeed very basic and primal, and good luck to 'em. The Stooges can get the juices flowing as effectively as Wagner (presumably this tube station isn't playing Ride Of The Valkyries in an attempt to calm teenagers down...).
Some rock and hip-hop is vastly more rhythmically, emotionally and tonally sophisticated than any of the popular Bach, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven era works. The post-Kid-A Radiohead albums would have many people scurrying back to The Magic Flute for something less emotionally and technically challenging. Jimi Hendrix throws more sophisticated chords into a single song than you'll hear in the whole of Don Giovanni.
I'm old enough to have "cooled down" into classical music by now. I think there are probably 20th century composers I could enjoy -- Shostakovich perhaps. But when I listen to the big names, I find it all a bit pedestrian; hemmed in to a few conventional harmonic structures and a fixed sonic palette.
I'm aware of all this (as I'm sure most on Slashdot are); what I haven't been able to find is an image of what Guy Fawkes masks looked like before V for Vendetta. As stated in the article, when creating the look for V in the graphic novel they used an existing cardboard Guy Fawkes mask as a reference - anyone know what these "original" masks looked like (no doubt they changed significantly through the years even before David Lloyd and Alan Moore left their mark)?
I don't believe there was a canonical mask before V. Google Image search "Penny for the guy" and ignore the V masks; there's little in common.
I can't find the interview, but I recall one with David Lloyd in which he said that the big change he made was to the smile -- but the mask they based it on wasn't a widespread image before that.
_Popular_ opensource projects _might_ get funding. The majority - SourceForge, GoogleCode, GitHub, CodePlex, have low professional quality or commercial value. Most of the time they are the hobby projects of individual developers with limited time.
This doesn't contradict my point. Yes, the majority of open source is created as a hobby. But the (say) 1% that is the product of paid professional work still represents a vast amount of code. And if you disregard software that hardly anyone's going to use, and the proportion gets much bigger.
You conveniently fail to mention that Al loses any competitive advantage he may have over Bill due to the software he wrote.
Depending on circumstances, having your own proprietary software could be a competitive advantage, or it could be a millstone around your neck. Ask yourself, who's got the competitive advantage -- the company using a home-grown web server with no user community, and 2 developers who know the code -- or the company using Apache, who's two developers participate in the Apache development process?
Maintaining code is more expensive than writing it. It's worth sharing that cost.
(I know what you want to say: the leechers who use Apache without doing any coding. But think back to when Apache was new, and people wanted new features all the time. Adding it yourself was the fastest/easiest option.)
Think of Memcached - written for LiveJournal. Would hoarding Memcached for themselves have given LiveJournal a competitive advantage? I don't think so. Someone would have written something functionally equivalent in no time. LiveJournal do better by building an OSS community around Memcached, and reaping the improvements, than they do by hoarding it.
Wow, you really don't understand the OSS business model, do you? After all these years.
Here, let me try to help.
Al runs a web site in 1993. Bill also runs a web site.
Al writes some code that makes his web server more useful. He lets Bill have that code too. That might appear to be "pure digital philanthropy", but it's not, it's quid-pro-quo. Bill looks over the new code and finds a defect, which he fixes. He sends the fix back to Al. Al has traded a feature for some bug checking. When Bill adds another useful feature, he gives it to Al.
Scale that to Chris, Dave, Evan etc. and you get a bunch of people getting *more value* by contributing to Apache, than they would by doing the alternatives (selling software, buying a web server).
Call it "the cloud", call it "software as a service" or call it "managed services" -- or just call it "running a web site". Companies that run services tend to use a lot of OSS.
You'd be *using* OSS software (Apache, memcached, Google Java libs, MySQL, all that kind of thing), and you'd be likely to be adapting it. Depending on the company, you might have to fight a bit if you want to contribute back to the OSS projects in a significant way.
Try IBM... then once you're in, work on getting moved to the right department.
It seems like everyone wants to object to this because Zynga's successful and commercial.
If it was Take-Two suing FreeCiv, everyone would be taking the "information wants to be free" angle.
We can't have it both ways. If you don't support Zynga on this, you've basically got to support software patents and all sorts of other bad, restrictive stuff.
It's good that ideas can be copied. We can't change our minds on that just because the copier happens to be rich and successful.
You don't need to "copyright" things. You automatically own copyright, on works that are in-scope, the moment you create it. There's no registration process or anything like that.
But: copyright doesn't apply to the rules of games. It's long established in US copyright law, hence all the variations of Monopoly.
Remake Civilization, with your own artwork, title, and independently-worded rulebook and no lawyer can touch you.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all true, but go back to the ancestor post that spawned all this:
[Rock's] appeal musically (when you ignore the words) is a more primal emotion. Clasical period music was designed to express more complex set of emotions.
That had to be contradicted.
German or Italian words don't count ;)
Clearly a huge chunk of rock/pop is three-chord-trick blues-derivative in 4-4, but even if that's 95%, the remaining 5% is significant.
Thanks for making my point and countering your own. Can we reduce or describe classical compositions in the same manner? Probably not. Classical compositions reach a complexity that is simply not describable nor reducible the way modern pop/rock is.
Well, we'd have to do some kind of survey. But my instinct is that 90% of classical music is 4/4, 3/4 ditties using conventional chord progressions in exactly the same way as 90% of pop music is. We can find exceptions on both sides, but they don't represent the mainstream on either side. Pachabel's Canon is no more sophisticated than A Whiter Shade of Pale although I suppose it has the distinction of doing it first.
You are deluding yourself. Hendrix's chordal structures are no different than any other blues artists' chordal structures. Blues is merely a simplification of Jazz. His structures are NOT complex by any stretch of the imagination... (root, 3rd, 5th, or root, minor 3rd, 5th... a diminshed 7th now and again... and precious little else) ... To suggest that Hendrix's music is more complex or richer than Bach's is patently ridiculous, on its face.
I'll maintain that it's more harmonically complex than the popular Mozart works (you'll note I'm backing away from Bach as an example). He's introducing 9ths and diminished 4ths and many more "odd" intervals. I don't want to get into a "Hendrix was special" argument though. You're right, he was just playing blues well. *Lots* of blues musicians use more complex chords than Mozart's market allowed him.
A six string guitar is a very simple instrument, compared to, say, a piano or an orchestra. The guitar is actually quite limited... because of its construction, most songs will be composed in the major keys of G, D, E, or A, or their relative minors.
But complex compared to a 4 stringed violin, or a monophonic flute, so I don't really see your point. Good guitarists play in any key, by virtue of not using open strings. Crap guitarists can fake it with a capo. Creative rockers experiment with alternative tunings. Rock music is made on pianos too. And in groups ranging from two people to a full orchestra.
12/8? I don't think so. Perhaps I exaggerated a bit... but a counter-example doesn't make your point. So the majority is 4/4, with a minimum of songs in 3/4, and 5/4. And that's it. 3 signatures. But my point is made once you agreed that the vast majority is 4/4. Being that there are some counter-examples of pop songs in the other two signatures does not support the argument that modern pop/rock is richer or more musically complex than classical.Â
This is silly. The vast majority of classical music is in 4/4 or 3/4 too. You're talking as if the classical canon is full of wacky time signatures. The popular classical pieces we're talking about certainly aren't. The 7/8, 5/4, 9/8 songs are outliers in classical music just as they are in rock. And that the case because the audiences can't tap their foot to them.
12/8 is the standard "slow blues" signature (Fleetwood Mac's "Need your love so bad" and hundreds of similar songs).
Further, your infatuation with Radiohead likely has more to do with production than composition... Personally, I feel I can reduce Radiohead to its core: what makes Radiohead original is the drummer. And even moreso... the drummers obsession with constantly banging the cymbals. [...] From my perspective, IMHO, Radiohead's "sound" is merely the evolution or resurgence of the popularity of the "sound" of Liverpool/Manchester movements, like Oasis and Blur...
I dunno what Radiohead album you've been listening to. We can agree they have a good drummer though :)
Rock songs in 5/4 are rare, but they do exist (easiest example: "Money" by Pink Floyd).
Oops, that one's 7/8. Typed in haste. I have performed Money in public, as the bassist... Lucky I didn't play in 5/4 on that occasion.
When The War Came by The Decemberists. Still no idea what time signature(s) the verses are. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD3fCVPBgcQ
I'm no fan of Metallica, but when Enter Sandman is performed by eight-year-olds... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CPHnZV0K-k
I'm not sure whether you were writing in parody mode or not.
Clearly a huge chunk of rock/pop is three-chord-trick blues-derivative in 4-4, but even if that's 95%, the remaining 5% is significant.
I didn't mention Kid Rock, because that *would* be absurd. I mentioned Kid A, Radiohead's leap into avant-garde "post-rock", influenced by 20th century classical, jazz and electronica.
I don't really want to single out Hendrix, except as an *example* of someone using more complex chordal structures than yer Bachs and Mozarts.
And (in your followup) you don't know a single rock/pop song that's not in 4/4 you've simply not looked. *Loads* in 12/8, quite a few in 3/4. Rock songs in 5/4 are rare, but they do exist (easiest example: "Money" by Pink Floyd).
If you delve into the world of 1970s prog rock, you'll find all kinds of wild musical experimentation.
If your intolerance of classical music is your reason for not taking public transit, perhaps you should just stay home.
Ah c'mon. Public transport isn't that bad. Public transport with THE F***ING FOUR SEASONS on a loop must be hell on earth.
Obviously this conversation isn't doesn't merit my trawling through 50 years of post-rock'n'roll music finding the good stuff.
I attended a Welsh National Opera performance of Don Giovanni late last year, and I enjoyed it. But, it's the pop music of it's time and it is decidedly populist in its ambitions. Simple story. Nice tunes. Harmonious backing in straight major and minor chords. Job done.
Hendrix habitually threw 7ths, 9ths, augmented 4ths into his chords; intervals which (apart from possibly the occasional 7th) Mozart's audiences would never have tolerated.
I was careful to limit my claim to the "popular Bach, Mozart, Handel and Beethoven works", because I'm sure there were works of greater sophistication written in that period and maybe by those people. But their popular works are popular because they're populist. And what makes them populist is that they are unchallenging.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9ETgswXg1E
Possibly the nadir of Western civilization.
I am 31 tears old, and i really, really hate pop and rock... why am i subjected to it at each store?
I think the difference is that shops are private enterprises and are free to attract or deter potential customers with whatever ambience they see fit. If a trendy clothes shop wants to keep squares out with pounding R&B, so be it.
Depending on where you live, railways may or not be private enterprises -- but they're granted a monopoly by the local government, and they shouldn't be deterring any legitimate users. Yes: silence would be preferable.
More people willing to ride the subway means more revenue.
What about the people (of all ages) less willing to ride the subway because of the irritating music?
Patronising, over-general and wrong, in my opinion.
Some rock and hip-hop is indeed very basic and primal, and good luck to 'em. The Stooges can get the juices flowing as effectively as Wagner (presumably this tube station isn't playing Ride Of The Valkyries in an attempt to calm teenagers down...).
Some rock and hip-hop is vastly more rhythmically, emotionally and tonally sophisticated than any of the popular Bach, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven era works. The post-Kid-A Radiohead albums would have many people scurrying back to The Magic Flute for something less emotionally and technically challenging. Jimi Hendrix throws more sophisticated chords into a single song than you'll hear in the whole of Don Giovanni.
I'm old enough to have "cooled down" into classical music by now. I think there are probably 20th century composers I could enjoy -- Shostakovich perhaps. But when I listen to the big names, I find it all a bit pedestrian; hemmed in to a few conventional harmonic structures and a fixed sonic palette.
I'm 38 years old. Definitely not a troublemaker. I have a legitimate reason to be waiting at train stations.
And I hate Handel and Mozart. Why should I be subjected to it?
Also, I can clearly hear those high pitched "mosquito" tones that are meant to disperse young people. Again, why should I be subjected to it?
And what about law abiding young people?
I'm aware of all this (as I'm sure most on Slashdot are); what I haven't been able to find is an image of what Guy Fawkes masks looked like before V for Vendetta. As stated in the article, when creating the look for V in the graphic novel they used an existing cardboard Guy Fawkes mask as a reference - anyone know what these "original" masks looked like (no doubt they changed significantly through the years even before David Lloyd and Alan Moore left their mark)?
I don't believe there was a canonical mask before V. Google Image search "Penny for the guy" and ignore the V masks; there's little in common.
I can't find the interview, but I recall one with David Lloyd in which he said that the big change he made was to the smile -- but the mask they based it on wasn't a widespread image before that.
... except the V mask has been appropriated by the Occupy movement, which is protesting about more serious matters than IP.
Install Windows/ARM on a RiscPC.
Acorn's machine had a 486 or 586 as a co-processor, so that RiscOS could host DOS apps running on their native processor.
_Popular_ opensource projects _might_ get funding. The majority - SourceForge, GoogleCode, GitHub, CodePlex, have low professional quality or commercial value. Most of the time they are the hobby projects of individual developers with limited time.
This doesn't contradict my point. Yes, the majority of open source is created as a hobby. But the (say) 1% that is the product of paid professional work still represents a vast amount of code. And if you disregard software that hardly anyone's going to use, and the proportion gets much bigger.
You conveniently fail to mention that Al loses any competitive advantage he may have over Bill due to the software he wrote.
Depending on circumstances, having your own proprietary software could be a competitive advantage, or it could be a millstone around your neck. Ask yourself, who's got the competitive advantage -- the company using a home-grown web server with no user community, and 2 developers who know the code -- or the company using Apache, who's two developers participate in the Apache development process?
Maintaining code is more expensive than writing it. It's worth sharing that cost.
(I know what you want to say: the leechers who use Apache without doing any coding. But think back to when Apache was new, and people wanted new features all the time. Adding it yourself was the fastest/easiest option.)
Think of Memcached - written for LiveJournal. Would hoarding Memcached for themselves have given LiveJournal a competitive advantage? I don't think so. Someone would have written something functionally equivalent in no time. LiveJournal do better by building an OSS community around Memcached, and reaping the improvements, than they do by hoarding it.
Not at all.
Vast amounts of open source code are written as official, company sanctioned projects by paid developers.
- all the Linux stuff contributed by RedHat - kernel and userland
- IBM's work on Eclipse, LVM, lots of other stuff
- er... lots more!
Wow, you really don't understand the OSS business model, do you? After all these years.
Here, let me try to help.
Al runs a web site in 1993. Bill also runs a web site.
Al writes some code that makes his web server more useful. He lets Bill have that code too.
That might appear to be "pure digital philanthropy", but it's not, it's quid-pro-quo. Bill looks over the new code and finds a defect, which he fixes. He sends the fix back to Al. Al has traded a feature for some bug checking. When Bill adds another useful feature, he gives it to Al.
Scale that to Chris, Dave, Evan etc. and you get a bunch of people getting *more value* by contributing to Apache, than they would by doing the alternatives (selling software, buying a web server).
Also...
Call it "the cloud", call it "software as a service" or call it "managed services" -- or just call it "running a web site". Companies that run services tend to use a lot of OSS.
You'd be *using* OSS software (Apache, memcached, Google Java libs, MySQL, all that kind of thing), and you'd be likely to be adapting it. Depending on the company, you might have to fight a bit if you want to contribute back to the OSS projects in a significant way.
Try IBM... then once you're in, work on getting moved to the right department.
It seems like everyone wants to object to this because Zynga's successful and commercial.
If it was Take-Two suing FreeCiv, everyone would be taking the "information wants to be free" angle.
We can't have it both ways. If you don't support Zynga on this, you've basically got to support software patents and all sorts of other bad, restrictive stuff.
It's good that ideas can be copied. We can't change our minds on that just because the copier happens to be rich and successful.
You don't need to "copyright" things. You automatically own copyright, on works that are in-scope, the moment you create it. There's no registration process or anything like that.
But: copyright doesn't apply to the rules of games. It's long established in US copyright law, hence all the variations of Monopoly.
Remake Civilization, with your own artwork, title, and independently-worded rulebook and no lawyer can touch you.
If it has been formal, there would have been fewer than 20 of you.
But since it was informal, less is acceptable I guess.