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."
Not just me (Score:5, Funny)
So it isn't just me?
Re:Not just me (Score:5, Funny)
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:5, Informative)
It's the Progressions More Than the Chords (Score:4, Informative)
They do a good job but they ripped it (unintentionally or not) from this guy's routine [youtube.com]. Yes this is the Pachelbel's Canon rant. Pachelbel's Canon is a baroque piece that follows roughly the I V vi IV progression. And as shown in both videos, it's probably more correct to say it's the progressions being reused, and how that is key since it is redundantly obvious that chords like notes are more limited and are always reused. Or like letters in the alphabet... there are only 26 but they can make millions of words (in many languages) depending on how they are ordered, or their progression.
For anyone who this flies over, it is really quite simple. We have seven notes in the traditional western scale (sometimes called the ionian mode [wikipedia.org] by music geeks). In grade school we first learn the musical scale as doe ray me fa so la tee doe. That's eight because we repeat the root (do'h). If we looked at a piano we can play starting from middle C, and get the same scale [wikipedia.org] by playing the key for the C note, then D, E, F, G, A, B, C [about.com].
We can also play the scale using chords [youtube.com] instead of individual notes, and this is key to understanding progressions. But if we want to play the scale using chords for the C scale (called the harmonized [wikipedia.org] scale), each chord needs to be made up of notes from only the C scale. If we played a harmonized scale in D, the notes of every chord would all need to belong to the D scale. This happens to work not too badly with a couple of minor (small pun here) changes. To keep it short, another important concept is that often the scale is enumerated. The first note of any scale is 1, the second 2. Usually this is done in Roman numerals. So a C in the C scale is I, the B is ii, the E is iii, the F is IV, the G is V, the A is iv, and the B is viib5 (the last one, minor seven flat 5 is a bit messed up, yeah). The upper and lower case is important, because upper case means a major or dominant chord and the lower case means minor.
We use the roman numerals because they can just be moved around to any scale. Say D, where the scale is D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D. So I, V, vi, IV as in Pachelbel's Canon, or the Axis of Awesome's Four Chords, is D, A, Bm, and G. Since you know it's I, V, vi, IV you can move it to the key of C and play C, G, A, F. If you were playing blues, the most common progression is I, IV, V (so you'll hear people saying, "hey, it's just one four five", and then often the key). You can hear a musician at a jam sometimes say, "there is a I, vi, ii, V turnaround." A very common turnaround and a type of progression.
So it is these chord progressions (encoded in roman numeral notation [wikipedia.org]) that are really important not so much the chords. Take for example the progression: I, III, IV, iv... That is the first four bars of Radiohead's Creep. But it is also the first four bars of a 1920s Bessie Smith tune called 'Ain't Nobodies Business; covered very successfully later on by Jimmy Witherspoon, BB King and Ruth Brown [youtube.com](key of Bb), and the BOMB, Freddie King (key of Db... with a I, vi, ii, V turnaround :).... and borrowed by Radiohead [youtube.com] (no turnaround... and nothing wrong with using the progression, like the article points out, there is limited set of progressions that sound good to people, their going to be reused).
To try to explain the reason for major and minor in a short space (it is is dense but should be understandable if you have even a little musical knowledge): Remembering the C scale is C, D, E, F, G, A, B: The first note is C
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:4, Informative)
Pachelbel's Canon has eight notes...
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.
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Well they are making music for the musically uneducated consumer, if I'm to take the free market libertarian stance that is so prevalent here. Me? I'm a part-time professional musician trained at university. Sometimes "dumb" music can sound good, but usually not. I like "smart pop", but even it's a dying breed.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:5, Funny)
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"Pachelbel's Canon has eight notes..."
Try doing a 4-voice canon with more, and making it listenable by anyone who isn't tone-deaf. Good luck.
Plus, it must be said that those notes are played in different octaves, at different times, by different instruments.
Most modern music can't even stretch high enough to kiss its ass.
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.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:5, Informative)
Without checking the TFA, I'd say, at least with more traditional pop songs, it all stems from the fact that certain keys are far easier to play with guitar than the others.
The most popular keys are majors A, E, C, G, and D. Take four basic chords in any of these, you end with
A D E F#m
E A B C#m
C F G Am
G C D Em
D G A Bm
So we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B majors and C#, E, F#, A, and B minors. That makes 13. Add Dm, and you cover most used minor keys, although pop music usually uses major chords (combined with minor melodies).
Some of these minor chords are probably pretty rare, and on the other hand the usual range of singers is another restricting factor. I actually don't listen to pop music enough to rememeber how this affects.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:5, Funny)
After riding with my son in his truck and being subjected to "Pop Metal", Whatever TFTI that is, the singers have a range of 1 note, which is a monotonic screeching somewhere between a donkey being molested by Jerry Sandusky and an elephant giving birth.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:5, Funny)
In other words, due to old age you are unable to hear the higher frequencies that pop-metal singers squeal at.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:4, Funny)
I expect I have better high frequency hearing than your average Metal fan simply due to the volume at which they listen to their music.
I buy stock in hearing aid companies.
Clint Eastwood should do a movie with the line "Turn that damn music down".
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.
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Who knows...I just ask, "What the hell is that?"
I changed the station to something more musical...like Led Zeppelin.
Re:The most used ten chords (Score:4, Informative)
Who knows...I just ask, "What the hell is that?"
I changed the station to something more musical...like Led Zeppelin.
I don't much like anything with unintelligible words, which greatly limits the modern metal I listen to.
The internet is almost dead at work (I suspect something to do with the Olympics...) but I like:
- Týr: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I1geB7U5VI [youtube.com]
- Subway to Sally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY-R7EeI7yw [youtube.com]
- Skyclad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVJkVCWXe9Q [youtube.com]
This is all (broadly) folk metal [wikipedia.org], and unfortunately isn't very popular outside Germany and Scandinavia
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I don't agree with the 4-chord criticism. You know you can take the 26 letters of the English alphabet and do a lot with it.
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.
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I find the author has found 10 chords in a key where only 8 are possible, frankly it takes his credibility away.
Why would you say that only 8 chords are possible in a key? All chords can be played in any key you choose; they're just in different positions in the mode (whichever mode that might be). For instance, if you really want, a C#m7 can appear in your tune no matter what key you're playing.
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So it isn't just me?
No, it's not just you but there is only so many combinations of "doof, doof, doof, doof, doof" you can have until you run out of combinations.
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Depeche Mode's "Behind The Wheel" is just 4 chords looping endlessly and happens to be a great song with a very creative arrangement that is full of layers. So it is possible to make good music with few chords, but I wonder how difficult it is to accomplish that. I mean, Is an 8-chord song more likely to be catchy than a 4-chord one?
Depeche Mode - Behind The Wheel [youtube.com]
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: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.
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Not sure how we got on Total Recall, but I'll take the version with Sharon Stone.
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Re:Wait till they factor in Autotune (Score:4, Funny)
All music is converging until it consists of single, steady tones.
Heard a great song today. It was B flat for three minute.
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo....
It rocks!
Re:Wait till they factor in Autotune (Score:5, Funny)
So the vuvuzelas at the World Cup were just ahead of their time, eh? :)
Re:Wait till they factor in Autotune (Score:5, Funny)
Someone please mod this off topic. We're talking about music.
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Ever heard 4'33"?
Has anyone?
I blame (Score:5, Informative)
Glee!
That shit all sounds the same. Same Autotuned voices that are bland and boring.
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Map of the Problematique sounds awful, which sucks because the song is otherwise such a good high-energy vamp. Also, there is a Guitar Hero-based "remaster" of Knights of Cydonia floating around the tubes which is purported to sound better than the CD release.
Muse is a big step up from Glee, but then so is a white-noise generator. It's not a very useful bar to set.
Re:I blame (Score:5, Interesting)
The same thing happened with a couple of Metallica songs from "...And Justice For All"; stupid Lars messed up the original mix so that Jason Newsted's bass couldn't be heard, but the Guitar Hero version had the bass much higher in the mix, so some fans remixed the songs and released them as "...And Justice for Jason".
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.
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Re:I blame (Score:4, Interesting)
He's alternately praised for having a rock solid back beat you couldn't move with a cran and then for not keeping metronome time but keeping with the feel of the song here:
http://web2.airmail.net/gshultz/drumpage.html [airmail.net]
George Martin -- "Ringo always got and still gets a unique sound out of his drums, as sound as distinctive as his voice. ... Ringo gets a looser deeper sound out of his drums that is unique. ...This detailed attention to the tone of his drums is one of the reasons for Ringo's brilliance. Another is that although Ringo does not keep time with a metronome accuracy, he has unrivaled feel for a song. If his timing fluctuates, it invariably does so in the right place at the right time, keep the right atmosphere going on the track and give it a rock solid foundation. This held true for every single Beatles number Richie played ... Ringo also was a great tom tom player." ( Summer of Love, 1994)
but also
George Martin -- "Ringo has a tremendous feel for a song and he always helped us hit the right tempo the first time. He was rock solid. This made the recording of all the Beatle songs so much easier." (interviewed in 1988 for The Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn)
Re:I blame (Score:4, Funny)
"Are you kidding! Ringo isn't even the best drummer in The Beatles!"
Re:I blame (Score:5, Interesting)
But these may be more what you are referring to...
quote from another site:
Ringo hated drum solos, which should win points with quite a few people. He only took one solo while with the Beatles. His eight measure solo appears during "The End" on the "B" side of Abbey Road. Some might say that it is not a great display of technical virtuosity, but they would be at least partially mistaken. You can set an electronic metronome to a perfect 126 beats per minute, then play it along with Ringo's solo and the two will stay exactly together.
Ringo's ability to play odd time signatures helped to push popular songwriting into uncharted areas. Two examples are "All you Need is Love" in 7/4 time, and "Here Comes the Sun" with repeating 11/8, 4/4, and 7/8 passages in the chorus.
So he could vary the tempo internally while maintaining a perfect beat (from one recording to the next apparently which let them easily cut the music together) in that section.
Re:I blame (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't replace people like this with a machine and they are not robots. Being able to vary is what sets artists apart from pastic stuff with midi ports.
I'd take a Buddy Rich over any sort of synthesized BS. It's the rough edges that keep stuff interesting.
I blame techno and the 90ies. They replaced real drum work with a tortoise in a trashcan that got kicked down a flight of stairs.
And in the 80ies we got the unholy trinity of Stock/Aitcken/Waterman who really figured out how to mass produce 'hits'. As long as people listen to codpiece Cowell we'd better not turn on the radio or TV because BS seems to sell.
Popular music has got no soul left. Crap in the 50ies, 60ies and 70ies had to be played mostly by real musicians.
Re:I blame (Score:5, Informative)
Being a drummer, I was never impressed with Ringo. But Ringo had a certain philosophy towards drumming that pretty much matched the Beatles, i.e., don't over do it. Somewhat like the drummer for AC/DC.
There are a load of good drummers nowadays, Virgil Donati, Dave Weckl, Dennis Chambers, etc. Many were inspired by Buddy Rich. If you want to hear a rockified Buddy Rich, get Roar of '74, the first 4-5 tracks have rhythms most rock drummers will never be able to do and they are all very, very fast. Live at Ronnie Scott's (the double CD) is also really good. Buddy was an animal drummer before the Muppet's Animal. Another good drummer/percussionists/you-name-it was Sammy Davis Jr. There's a youtube of him playing drums, then get gets off that starts playing vibes. He could tap dance on stairs. The things he could do in dance when he was younger seem impossible. He was break-dancing long before the hip-hop crowd decided mono-culture, mono-beat, mono-everything was somehow good. Lionel Hampton was a good drummer and vibes player also.
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Re:I blame (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a part-time professional drummer (trained at university). The only people who think Ringo is a good drummer are those older than me (I'm 42), and Ringo himself. Just ask him.
Ringo is a lefty with obvious right-hand weaknesses, but he plays on a right-handed kit, which has made him adapt, which is what gives him that unique Ringo sound (5 notes where there would normally be 4 or 6, for a Ringo drum lick standard).
There's a reason Ringo doesn't do drum solos or drum clinics/dvds. He has very limited chops. This isn't to say he isn't a musical drummer, he's just not the god that old Beatle fanboys think he is.
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:I blame (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm a big fan of uncompressed audio, but iTunes downloads are actually decent in quality, if memory serves (I really only listen to CD's, so I guess that largely invalidates my claim). About 6 years ago I spent a good amount of time A/B'ing between different compression types, bitrates, etc. I seem to remember 160 Kbps with AAC being rather difficult to pick up, and I do consider my ear to be "better than normal," as my schooling, hobbies, and professions have all been tied into music in some way either cur
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16 bit stereo at 44.1KHz can accurately reproduce frequencies up to 22.05KHz ...
I disagree somewhat with the 'accurately' part for frequencies very close to or at the Nyquist limit. With about two samples per cycle, you can get anywhere from silence to somewhat accurate depending on the phase relationship between the ADC clock and the tone at 22.05kHz.
Also, there has to be enough room for the output filter to roll off from acceptably-close-to-zero attenuation at the highest audible frequency to acceptably-c
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.
Re:I blame (Score:5, Informative)
MP3s, at a sufficiently high bitrate, are indistiguishable from CDs.
Gold plated sh*t is still sh*t, news at ten.
(CDs are not an example of good quality audio)
There's no snob like a music snob.
Perhaps if you are a concert pianist you can tell the difference between a CD recording of a Mozart piano concerto and the same thing on high quality digital tape (or whatever counts as good quality audio). For most of us, they will sound exactly the same.
Re:I blame (Score:4, Interesting)
To be more serious about it: CD quality is more than what 90% of people can hear on 90% of sound systems, for 90% of music.
For a 'fuller' experience, you need several thousand worth of sound equipment and generally young ears to hear the high end that's not on CD, or a really good sub to reach lower.
It's quite possible to have music fuller that even I can hear, but then you're looking at a sound hall for it.
CD mastering techniques, and distortion preferences(such as prefering tube amplifiers) is a perception issue seperate from raw sound data.
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:I blame (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder.... does the sheer quantity of pop music compensate for the loss of quality.
Is is just that overal songs have gotten more similar or that more similar sounding songs are being released.
Is there still the same amount of non-similar songs?
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?
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Which of course is clearly inspired by this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM [youtube.com]
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I've got the wrong brain for music, but can someone tell me if this is also true for a song like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTklGbD19F4 [youtube.com] (VNV Nation - Space & Time.)
Or does it use different chords?
Is it also true for something like this or is that totally different (is it "chords" at all?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfuierUvx1A [youtube.com] (Conspiracy - Chaos theory 64k demo.) (Oh what the heck, Razor1911 - The scene is dead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFXIGHOElrE [youtube.com])
Things like these aren't accords eit
Traditional British/American folk music also (Score:5, Informative)
Woody Guthrie said that if you're using more than three or four chords in a song you're just showing off. And a lot of the garage bands of the 50s-70s started off only knowing four chords, and that was really enough; you could always transpose if you didn't know the chords.
I play a few genres of traditional music - old-timey, Irish, a bit of bluegrass, some folk, some German. I mainly play mountain dulcimer, which is a diatonic instrument, so changing keys is annoying, since you have to retune, as opposed to guitars, pianos, and accordions where you've got the whole chromatic scale there. It turns out that there's a very wide range of music that not only uses only 3 or 4 chords per song, but always uses the same scale because that's friendly to the fiddle player or piper, and also if you don't have many strings, you can't play very complicated chords. But just because it's the same few chords, that doesn't mean the melodies aren't complex and/or weird, and I don't think they were measuring that.
So it's I, IV, V (or V7, especially for blues), and maybe a VII or the minor ii or minor vi. And the key is usually in D or G, or E minor for Irish, or A for old-timey (though the A tunes might not be an major scale - they're often Dorian or Mixolydian, which are a bit minor, though the chords will usually still be A, D, G, and sometimes E.) So the chords end up as D, G, A, C, and occasionally E or Em or Bm.
French traditional music seems to mostly use a C scale instead of a D (so it's like playing on the white keys of the piano instead of transposed up a whole step.) I've been doing some German beergarden stuff recently, and it's been all over the map - most of it's 3 or 4 chords, but maybe the key is C or F or Bflat (which is brass-friendly), and there are a lot of 7th chords because accordions are good at those and they sound a bit schmaltzier.
And yes, the jazz and classical people always did much fancier chord work. And there are a lot of amazing guitarists out there, and sometimes if you can't figure out how they played something it was because they're using alternate guitar tunings to get different chord inversions, or they threw in an ARRR-flat-7th-diminished-dominant9th chord just to add some color or because it matched the lyrics or covered up the horribly wrong note the bass player had just played. (By contrast, if a bluegrass guitar wants to show off, it's more likely to be by playing a riff extra-fast by adding grace notes, or by throwing in a few bars from another well-known song that's related in some way. And if Woody Guthrie wanted to show off, he'd doing it by writing some really incisive lyrics or getting the audience to go on strike.)
Re:Traditional British/American folk music also (Score:5, Informative)
Woody Guthrie also said this little gem:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Re:Traditional British/American folk music also (Score:5, Funny)
Lou Reed: "One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Scientific approach aside, I think the more interested you are in something, not just a musical genre, the more you are inclined to notice the components which differentiate one from the other. If you aren’t interested in a specific genre of music, then yeah, it’s all going to sound the same because your brain goes into "ugh, techo" mode.
My music tastes tend to hover around the classic/progressive rock band. Most Techo/electric/dubstep/house/etc all sounds the same to me because my brain doesn’t even spend the effort to actually listen (where it would notice the differences) and just goes “ick”. Same with pop music, country, rap.. (especially rap!).
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think it's merely perception in your case. Classical music reached considerable complexity, and the modern forms in some cases are even more complex, both in chords, changes and even in the scales used. Progressive rock in many cases has tried to replicate, though not often with as much success, the complexity and diversity of classical forms. You take a band like, say, King Crimson, where Fripp and his cowriters went out of their way to use bizarre tunings, strange chord sequences ripped from jazz, classical and even early and mid-20th century avante garde. The same goes for many 1970s prog rock acts like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes. Some of the progressive rock musicians, like Robert Fripp, Chris Squire, Bill Bruford, Neil Peart, Tony Banks, David Gilmour and Rick Wakeman are considered some of the most talented musicians to play "popular" music. There are still a few acts out there that follow in their steps, but by and large full blown prog rock pretty much died by the early 1980s, which is when I think you began to see the beginnings of a slide towards conformity.
But also keep in mind here that most popular musicians from the post-war period onward did not receive any kind of formal training. While that doesn't make becoming a good songwriter impossible, it makes it harder. What I will note from my knowledge of popular music over the last half century is that those songwriters who did excel were ones who often had a very wide familiarity with music. Take the Beatles. You listen to a lot of their early recordings, in particular the BBC Sessions from 1963 to 1965, you find that these guys had an enormous wealth of popular and obscure songs in many genres; rock, rockabilly, R&B, blues, jazz, show tunes, country and western, in fact they were walking encyclopedias of music from the pre-war and immediate post-war period, so when they went to pen their own songs, even the seeming trifles from early on, they could draw on that encyclopedia to come up with all sorts of odd changes and surprising chord progressions you wouldn't expect to find from four young men of seemingly limited experience.
Prog rock is not 'complex' :-) (Score:3)
Progressive rock in many cases has tried to replicate, though not often with as much success, the complexity and diversity of classical forms.
Eh ?
:-)
Look mate....... All the truly great music, anything from Beethoven to the Rolling Stones, sounds very simple, but when you break it down you realise it's actually very complex.
Prog Rock on the other hand, sounds very complex, but when you break it down you realise it's moronic.
Re: (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.
9dB is ALOT (Score:3, Informative)
9 might sound like a small number, but dB is a logarithmic measuring. 9dB louder (please correct me if I'm wrong) mean 8 TIMES louder.
Re: (Score:3)
To further complicate things however, it is not directly tied to perception either..
In other words, it doesn't actually sound 8 times louder...
Re:9dB is ALOT (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:9dB is ALOT (Score:4, Informative)
Of course it works backwards, if you get the maths right. ;) 3dB is half-power, not 1/8th power.
But I submit that a 3dB difference is indeed very audible. It is exactly the same difference as using an amplifier that is twice (or half) as powerful.
I work with audio and routinely tweak things on the order of 0.5-.25dB, and routinely do blind (not double-blind) comparisons in the course of my work. I find that these small adjustments are identifiable, though it involves careful listening (which is something I've trained my brain to be able to do over a couple of decades). A 1dB change, on the other hand, is garish in its obviousness (to me).
That all said: Of course lowering the volume by 3dB is going to decrease the amount of hearing damage you receive: The more you use your ears, the worse they get. Lowering it by 10dB will help even more. Living in a world with your ears stuffed with earplugs will help reduce hearing damage from environmental sounds dramatically.
It's somewhat of a slippery slope.
Balancing hearing damage with enjoyment is really not a mathematical problem, but more something spiritual: You only live once, and death is inevitable. IMHO: If it's fun to turn it up occasionally, do so. When it stops being fun, stop doing so. If you're concerned about having the most perfect hearing that is practical and want memories of always being astutely careful on your deathbed, then don't turn it up. Ever.
If you'd rather have fond memories of social events and fun times that involve loud music when you die, then give the knob a clockwise twist when it's fun, and enjoy. And then turn it back down when the fun stops, which might be minutes or hours later, so you've got some left for the next time it seems fun.
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9 might sound like a small number, but dB is a logarithmic measuring. 9dB louder (please correct me if I'm wrong) mean 8 TIMES louder.
That depends on what you mean by louder. If, as I think is reasonable, you see (hear) it from a listener perspective, then 9 dB is three small volume steps - the smallest step in volume that's apparent to most listeners is around 3 dB.
Also, as the total dB goes up, the difference becomes less important - a 110 dB fricking loud isn't that much different from a 118 dB fricking loud, despite the energy being much higher.
Re:9dB is ALOT (Score:5, Interesting)
It's what you get used to.
A well calibrated home theater can be much quieter than that if you do not listen to louder music all the time.
As the blind person's other senses get more powerful the same thing will happen with your hearing.
If you cut back on your sugar intake by 80%, you will be amazed how overly sweet everything is. 85% dark chocolate starts to taste like milk chocolate after a while and milk chocolate tastes like a bar of pure sugar dusted with chocolate.
You do not need to have your shirt moved by the sound of explosions in an action movie.
You are supposed to though (Score:5, Informative)
Movies are mixed with absolute reference levels in mind. The THX theater spec is 105dB peak for the mains, 115dB peak for the sub. That is the actual level to which movies are mixed. Doesn't mean they have to reach them, but it means they can. A calibrated, THX compliant home system will be able to reach 105dB when the volume dial is set to 0dB (they backed off on the sub for home, requiring only 105dB as few would be willing to spend the money required for 115dB).
Movies are set up to be able to have big hits, and action movies use them. Speech is often 30-40dB below the peaks (Dolby tracks contain encoding letting the decoder know the dialogue normalization relative to peak).
Also in terms of sound, it isn't a 100% subjective "just get used to lower levels" thing. Your perception of loudness is not equal across frequency bands. Have a look at the Equal Loudness Contour graphs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour). These show at what level a signal must be played to be perceptually equal per frequency. So if you wanted to listen to music at 40dB for the midrange, which is barely over the noise floor of most houses, you would need the lowest bass frequencies to be near 100dB to give equal loudness. However moving up to 80dB for the mids, you only move up to 120dB for the lowest sounds.
So just reducing the volume does not give the same sonic experience unless you re-equalize the track. For movies with their soundtrack encoded at reference levels on disc (something you don't find as often as you should) there is technology to do so on higher end receivers like Audyssey Dynamic EQ and Dolby volume, but it is hard to do for music as there is no reference standards.
You also run in to the problem of signal to noise ratio. Anything less than 40dB (meaning a signal 40dB above noise) is pretty easy to notice, and you can hear more than that. Well, if your room has an ambient noise level of 30dB, which is pretty quiet for a room in an urban setting, you need 70dB average signal level to get 40dB of SNR.
Finally, if you want music that is largely or completely devoid of dynamic compression, you need a good deal of headroom. Many instruments can have large transients. So for example if you want 20dB of headroom, you'd need playback set to do 90dB for a signal that was 70dB average. Pop music doesn't do that, it is squashed to all hell and gone, but classical can. As a simple example I have a track that I mixed from an old videogame MIDI using real sampled instruments. It is normalized to 0dBSPL (as you do with digital tracks), however the RMS level is -17.5dB. So you need to set the volume dial 17dB higher than the average level you wish to maintain, because it has large peaks (this is in an unprocessed state, no compression applied).
While I'm all about not abusing the volume dial and hurting your hearing, sound perception is more complex than "Just turn it down and you'll get used to it."
Big surprise? (Score:5, Informative)
Is it a big surprise that contemporary music sounds alike? They keep sampling each other's songs, with and without permission, and recycling the all sorts of song elements. That is before you consider different bands performing each other's music outright. The current custom seems to produce homogenized music.
Rick James - Super Freak [youtube.com]
MC Hammer - U Can't Touch This [youtube.com]
Jay - Z Kingdom Come. [youtube.com]
Gucci Mane - Freaky Gurl [youtube.com]
Wikipedia has a more complete list. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Big surprise? (Score:4, Interesting)
The ghost of Phil (Score:3)
No pun intended, but Phil Specter knew that 49 years ago. The son 'Da doo Ron Ron' was deliberately made to be the sum of all pop songs, which was the theory behind the Wall of Sound', and IMHO has artistic merit for that point alone.
Re: (Score:3)
Phil Spector happens to still be alive. In jail, but still alive.
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: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: (Score:3)
Minimalism? Or maybe just variation?
Minimalism has a deeply hipster heritage. Sometime late in the 16th century some clever guy observed, "Hey, look! In the past they made complex, ponderous music in line with the ponderous, complex architecture and interior decoration that was in style that day. Today, we prefer simpler, smoother lines in our rococco chairs, and what do you know, we prefer simpler, more elegant music as well! Maybe music reflects the society we live in?"
Then for a hundred years or so, comp
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A particular way that is entirely based upon marketing, social control of the highest order, inflicted upon them by a very small number of corporations. It's long been known that popular culture drives consumer culture.
Why do you think so much popular music name-checks products? Listen to any song by the most popular rappers and you will hear wall to wall product placement.
My point is that the fundamental flaw in our econo
Comment removed (Score:3)
It's also the instruments (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a lot of songs you can recognize instantly from the 60's and 70's because they used unusual instruments like the sitar.
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..
Wrong, wrong, wrong ... 9 dB quieter (Score:3)
Really simplistically, recording with 9dB less headroom increases the AVERAGE volume by 9db and the PEAK by 0db.
So adjusting your listening environment back down by 9dB to compensate for the 'loudness wars' and return the music to same AVERAGE level actually reduces the PEAK volume by 9dB ... either the average volume goes up or the peak volume comes down, or in reality partly both
Simply, the loudness wars caused the PEAK volume to decrease ... feel free to disagree ;-)
A few complaints (Score:5, Interesting)
Understanding that pop music in this article surely refers to popular music of today and not specifically electronic, mostly dance, music, I've got a few complaints about this article.
1. If you analyze music based solely on the mathematical characteristics of the sound without any historical or cultural context, you might as well follow with a critique of paintings by counting the number of colors used by Rembrandt vs those used by Warhol.
2. Music is genealogy. Ergo, similarity must exist. It indicates the convergence of genetics from multiple sources into a singular modern pop musical form. Today's popular music can have a rhythm section that borrows heavily from Caribbean sounds which borrow from African, and yet have neo-classical European influences in the melody. We'll ignore the fact as we're talking about western music, we're already dealing with a specific set of genetic traits.
3. The commonality of musical instruments (digital gear included) means that there will be common sounds. Most the hot rodded guitar pickups you buy today are based on one of two platforms: mahogany and maple bodied PAF guitar or alder/ash bodied single coil guitar. PAF was a 50's era technology. One of the pickups I play today is a 36th Anniversary Dimarzio PAF that is a copy of the original Gibson PAF. Also: Def Leppard's "Hysteria", ZZ Top's "Eliminator", and Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" are three genetically diverse rock albums which share a similar sound because all three employ the use of Tom Scholz' Rockman guitar amp, compressor and chorus/echo gear which Tom created to encapsulate his signature Boston guitar sound. Additionally, much of the synth sounds used in pop music are signature preset sounds that vary between brands and models of keyboard synthesizers. Yes, folks, just as there is a Fender sound and a Marshall sound, there is also a Korg sound and a Roland sound.
4. Music has gotten louder in part because music has gotten heavier due to the influences of each generation before. I myself a British rock guitarist. My sound is the British sound (ie, Marshall amps, V shape equalization, heavy overdriven PAF style humbucker sound with obvious blues background that originate in the Mississippi Delta mixed with decidedly German cultural influences). I was influenced by bands that were influenced by Led Zeppelin, Buddy Guy, and so on. The kids who came after me were influenced by bands that were contemporary to my sound (Metallica and so on). There's a reason why I don't hear a lot of blues in today's harder heavy metal, and it's because those kids grew up listening to Metallica in the 90s whereas I grew watching Metallica in the 80s. Every genre of music has gotten heavier. Hip Hop/Rap musicians aren't doing Zip Zap Rap anymore. Even American country music is heavier and more rocking today than during the days of Merle Haggard. Pop music today is heavily influenced by the club scene as it has been for a long time. And today's club scene is very bass-heavy.
5. 60 years is not a long enough time to be making an educated criticism about how today's music sounds the same. 60 years is not even the lifetime of a person. 60 years means I can take Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Ry Cooder, Frank Zappa, David Gilmour, Tony Iommi, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Adrian Smith, Paul Gilbert, Slash, John Mayer, Joe Bonamassa, and Orianthi Panagaris, and put them into a single room and they will find a common dialect in music with which to communicate. And actually, with a few exceptions, I can do that. The point is, in 2012, we're still only a few generations removed from the earlier pop musical forms that are perceivably distinct enough that we'd consider them alien in comparison; for example, big band music.
6. Congratulations, with this research at hand, some crotchety geezer can shout that it sounds the same, then blame some anonymous music industry exec for ensuring that all music anywhere is exactly similar.
Re: (Score:3)
There are two forces at work... (Score:3)
Look at the 70s. The vastness of musical genres was amazing. As bad as the recording industry was, it just let artists be artists and we got a 1,000 unique styles and voices. Look at the female vocalists. Not a professional model among the lot, but sweet jebus they could wail your brains out at 50 paces. Today must is preprogrammed, preprocessed, tested for all the parameters that will make it a top 20s hit, and press fit to the production standards bankers have come to know and love. The women are all size 0, curly blonds, with precise the right dimples, and are so perky you wanna stick'em with hat pins to see if they explode.
Go to the indie providers. All the great musicians are still making music, just not for the bankers.
Comparison to 'Older music' not fair (Score:4, Interesting)
It's easy to dismiss today's pop-music as simplistic and look up to Wagners and Mozarts of the past. However, 200 years ago, most of the western worlds population never heard an opera and the music they were playing/singing and listening to was just as simplistic. A typical tune, like Pastime with Good Company [youtube.com] was nowhere near the complexity of the Ride of the Valkyries
On the other hand, there is still a lot of serious music being made [youtube.com] now-days that is being listened to by a minority, just like before.
sometimes that's a good thing though. (Score:3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAylogfO7Hs [youtube.com]
^ wouldn't work if it was too complex (may still not work as is for you, but works for me).
If you make it because you want to say something, or just hypnotize and/or enjoy yourself, anything you do is a Good Thing in my books. If music becomes more simple on average, that might also mean it becomes more accessible? By that I mean, every fucktard can make "music" these days -- I must know, I did it myself. And yes, it's super simple and shallow, I ain't a musician. But it's fun to do, and beats just singing the songs others wrote.
Also, I will always love the song "Doop". Sue me :P Actually, there are many simple songs I like... for example, how is The Blue Danube Waltz [youtube.com] not simple, and how is that a problem? To me that is THE pop song of classical music, and I love it to bits.
Orwell said about writing that bloat and pretension come from dishonest aims. I think that's not entirely fair (when taken out of context at least), because maybe it also can come from the sheer joy of language and strange words, sometimes. And perhaps you can say the same for music... sometimes it's complex because someone got really lost into what they were doing, sometimes it's complex because it's over-engineered bullshit, sometimes it's simple because it came from the heart from untalented or unpracticed fingers, sometimes it's simple because it's a money-making scam. I'd say, play from and listen with your heart. The calculator cannot help you here.
Take this [youtube.com] for example. Is it music? For me it's just a buildup to be able to say something in last part, only then the previous repetition takes on meaning by being chopped up... that's just a guess, I can't put the finger on why I adore this song.. maybe I'm just rationalizing it ^^ But for me the intro HAS to be simple and kinda boring, so the ending has a stage on which to do a very short and very powerful dance. Not complex by any means, and it would mean nothing, or anything, without the vocal sample. So what... ?
CDBaby? (Score:3)
If you get your music from your local ClearChannel station, or via American Idol / the Musical Industrial Complex, sure, you get homogenized pap. But there is good music out there. It's just not presented to you any more ... you've got to dig a bit. Go listen to a few local acts, or tune in when you watch a good indy flic (how I discovered Tom Waits).
It's out there and it's worth finding -- as much or more variety as there's ever been, but better hidden.
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: (Score:3)
Aren't these things real complexity to you? Why not? Not any mode shift, tempo shift or synth embellishment is equally good. Discovering post rock I've gained an appreciation for just how much you can do with just dynamics.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Or compare Hendrix to the Foo Fighters, Both rock, both very different. Even with Hendrix, compare Little Wing to All Along the Watch Tower to Star Spangled Banner. Very different styles of music from the same artist. With the Foo Fighters, compare Aurora to Stacked Actors or Generator, very different songs and they're on the same album.
I'm yet to see that kind of variety from Beyonce, Jay Z or Katy Perry. Hell even the likes of Slipknot have more variety and I think Slipknots music sounds very similar (
Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, Beyonce's music shows a great deal of variation! She covers all themes from "I strong independent woman and I gots my man but why he not put ring on muh finger?" through to "We honeys be single confident woman dancing and whooping, and 'aint gon be needin' no man to put a ring on us fingers". The music itself is just as varied and interesting as her lyrics.
Re: (Score:3)
Submitter here: RTFA!!! The point is that music has become measurably more similar over the last 50 years.
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What is "rap music"? Rapping is a technique which is used across a wide range of genres (acid jazz, hip-hop, grime...) "Rap music" is only a slightly more precise term than "guitar bands".