Study Finds New Pop Music Does All Sound the Same 576
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."
I thought there were only 4 chords used in pop... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I thought there were only 4 chords used in pop. (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh.. Only four bases used in your DNA. What's your point?
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
This started before the internet was popular. It started when the big labels didn't want to take risks on anything non-mainstream any more.
Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
off key (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wait till they factor in Autotune (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet it'll be even worse a decade from now.
Yes, and no thanks to MAFIAA
Re:I blame (Score:4, Insightful)
Another element is that the original drummers varied the meter and tempo of the drums dynamically. I saw a really cool video analysis of Ringo and so other old school drummers and it was anything BUT an even perfect beat. And it was intentional the way they sped up or slowed down the beat in a very analog manner.
Currently, artificial drums have the same tempo.
The most used ten chords (Score:2, Insightful)
I tried, yes, I really tried, to read through TFA, filled with scientific jargons and graphs and such
And then I read the summary on economist.com
Both mentioned "10 chords" that were used most
Unfortunately, after reading both articles my eyes have gone bonkers, and now I simply couldn't locate the "10 chords" that they were talking about
Which are the "10 chords" that were most regularly used?
Anyone??
Re:It's also the instruments (Score:4, Insightful)
For me, the '70s brought synthesizers which introduced a radical change in music. Prog Rock from the '70s was significant different to its predecessors and successors. Think of Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, etc..
Re:I blame (Score:5, Insightful)
MP3s, at a sufficiently high bitrate, are indistiguishable from CDs. They were doing this loudness war crap well before iTunes came along; it started back in the 90s. The real reason is they wanted songs to sound louder on the radio. It's just like how TV commercials are louder, so that people will pay more attention to them; songs on the radio are really advertisements for those songs, so they got the bright idea to compress the music to boost the apparent loudness to make their song sound louder than the other songs. Of course, they all started doing it pretty soon.
Don't blame tech (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wait till they factor in Autotune (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:off key (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the music that's lacking variety, it's the economy.
Copyright replaced passion for composing music by greed.
Instead of making music that touches the heart, nowadays the only music that is created is the kind that sells best.
Copyright is, contrary to political belief, not a good thing.
It is almost like small-term investments. Optimize your profits, and don't think about societal impact, and true wealth (happiness).
We need to seriously consider that our capitalist view of the world is just not so perfect after all.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I blame (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking as somebody who went through music conservatory:
1. There is a slight difference between live performance and recorded performance - the best live performers add different nuances each time they play something, the very top frequency range necessarily gets dropped when you record (although this is hard to hear anyways, so it doesn't make a huge difference), and the acoustics of a concert hall are significantly different from a recording booth.
2. The difference between a CD recording and other recording media is so small that you can't really hear the difference.
3. Most good music sounds good even on a bad recording medium, and most bad music sounds bad even on a great recording medium. For instance, I can enjoy early jazz recordings on wax cylindar, even though the recording is horrible. I can loathe recordings by 'N' Sync even though the recording is spot-on. Even in electronic music, the Dr Who theme sounds great even though it was made by splicing small bits of tape together, while there's thoroughly lousy modern electronica made on the latest and greatest equipment.
So it's not so much music snobbery as it is audiophile stupidity to think it's worth getting worked up over sound quality.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not just me (Score:5, Insightful)
Time Blurs memory.
A lot of popular tunes of yesteryear, have been mostly forgotten, leaving the more valuable rare gems to stand out. So you listen to the oldies station 50's 60's and 70's the station is playing 3 decades of the best music. You listen to a popular music station you get 5 years of music, And they repeat the same stuff the same amount of time.
So you have 300 songs over 30 years vs. 300 songs over the last 5 years.
Then you have the classical Music Stations that has 300 songs over the past 300 years.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:4, Insightful)
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.