Muff's Modules & More

swiv

Interesting article.

http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120726/srep00521/full/srep00521.html

Just me · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 7:45 am Post subject:

Homogenous. Because the masses are too stupid to listen to anything that requires understanding.

ZoeB · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2012 5:09 am Post subject:

Hmm, I still can't work out exactly how they mined all that data, even after skimming both the main paper and the supplementary information. It all went over my head a bit... But I realise algorithms exist that can sort of reasonably well work out the notation of an audio recording, and analysing the loudness is a doddle. It's the timbre bit I'm curious about.

Sure, as a result of globalisation, music is getting homogenised into one large melting pot even faster than language. That makes sense. You can listen to music from London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mumbai, and it will all sound very similar, all using major and minor keys in twelve tone equal temperament in new native music now, and often playing the same exact foreign songs as other countries. (Compare Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat to the techno genre being developed in Detroit. They didn't influence each other, but used the same technology, which clearly was the main influence of both their styles.)

But, although there's less diversity from one country to the next as we all homogenise into a single culture, that one culture (or rather, one globally accessible set of cultures and counter-cultures) should still get more diverse, not less. Not only is it mixing and matching memes and technologies from all the other cultures for as long as they exist, but science is always improving our knowledge of how the world works, meaning that we're always improving our ability to make technology, meaning we have better tools to make art, giving us more timbres with each new significant invention. You couldn't have jungle, drum'n'bass, hip hop, or vast amounts of house without samplers, for instance. You couldn't have much in the way of modern music at all without the ability to record sound and play it back. Most modern music can't be performed live and sound anything like the studio version.

Anyway, with each new piece of technology, some people use it, and some don't, so that should constantly widen the timbral palette available to everybody. Sure, everyone now has access to the exact same sounds as everyone else in the world, but that library is constantly being added to.

I can see how, at first, popular music had less timbral variety than classical music as most people couldn't afford particularly grand instruments or assemble themselves spontaneously (or, rather, organically, using a bottom-up approach) into very large groups, but technology has now more than compensated for that. Anyone with a computer and a few hundred pounds to spare can have access to more timbres than Bach ever did, let alone Chuck Berry.

So I'm not at all convinced that there's less timbral variation now than there was at any point before, but I lack the knowledge to know how to formally go about trying to prove this. I'm not even sure where you'd draw the line with what music counts as popular (Would Autechre count? Merzbow?) or what counts as a distinct timbre anyway. (A TR-808 snare drum set to not very snappy, then very snappy? An 808 snare drum compared to a 909 snare drum? Compared to a real snare drum? Compared to something other than a snare drum?)

ZoeB · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2012 5:29 am Post subject:

Ah, looking at it again, it looks like the timbre is at least partially worked out from the volume contour, and partially from Fourier techniques, with the details of the latter still going over my head. So maybe that would lump all atonal percussion within a certain frequency range together? In which case, yes, it's true that snares in general have been very fashionable for the last 80 or so years, as have kick drums, hi-hats, and electric guitars... But that's even more true within rock (and metal, indie, etc) than pop (and electronic, hip hop, etc).

I think the problem is less that the music's stagnant and more that people either aren't making original technology that's not derivative of old, existing technology very much, or that musicians aren't embracing such technology.

Rogue Ai · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2012 11:52 pm Post subject:

I blame Sylenth1 presets and Vengeance samples. hihi

04tm34l3 · Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2012 1:18 pm Post subject:

Rogue Ai · Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2012 11:05 pm Post subject:

04tm34l3 · Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2012 1:40 pm Post subject:

slovo · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 11:02 am Post subject:

The thing that bothers me about this "research" is that it ignores completely all forms of modern music which defy pop chord structure. Admittedly they are only out to analyze pop music, but who the fuck cares about pop music? How many more minutes until more people are on Youtube watching Persian techno than watching Barbie Girl of the Month? At that point, what is pop music? We are as quickly reaching a full collision between all musics, much faster than we are being sucked into 3-chord mania. Anyone who took their blinders off would see that as skull-explodingly obvious. Just looks at dubstep. You reactionaries see it as more of the same, competition, derivative, yadda yadda. But the reality is that all the stuff our generation was spurned for liking, "not music" etc, is now mundane to many of these kids. Field recordings, glitchmusik, backbeats utilizing mixes of tom waits and marimba bands, and stuff, that's ordinary humdrum samples for nicki minaj now. Some older examples remain fierce and prescient, as always. However, overall, I believe the modern youth is far more cognizant of sophisticated textures and longer forms than we were. Think about it. "hipsters" as you love to insult them. Think of the aging ones -- you know, this generation's version of our moms and dads around the time they had us. Our parents were still listening to radio nostalgia trash without even the slightest inkling of what cradle-to-grave marketing was. These lame-o hipsters are actually getting out there and experimenting, listening to whatever they can get their hands on. Maybe it seems a little too-little-too-late to some of us who are more engaged, but it's a hell of a lot more sophisticated fanbase than the prog rockers and disco artists had to draw from. The pop radio hype machine merely funnels itself into an ever-increasing irrelevancy to all but the very narrowest of target markets. Admittedly, for now that is where all the money is going d'oh!

but it can't last forever... unless I guess if they manage to sell us all broadband packages with metered-everything-except-clear-channel.

slovo · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 1:46 pm Post subject:

I pre-emptively retract my earlier use of "quotes" in reference to the research. That was petulant. It's clearly research. I just think it seems like research with the sampling deliberately chosen to prove the validity of the hypothesis.

rowman · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 10:49 pm Post subject:

In the hands of a good songwriter, 3 chords is more than enough.

Norman_Phay · Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2012 7:19 am Post subject:

diasporos · Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 7:23 am Post subject:

I think it's even better to view this evolution in a larger context than just the past 50-80 years. This music was developed at the same time as 'art music' (I don't like the term but whatever) and can be better understood if we look at that history as well.

It seems that musical systems of thought follow a path from simplicity to complexity until they reach saturation or a threshold of acceptability then they either disenfranchise the listeners or they undergo radical change towards a new narrative.

ZoeB · Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 8:15 am Post subject:

diasporos · Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 8:59 am Post subject:

ZoeB · Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 11:31 am Post subject:

CJ Miller · Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 6:48 am Post subject:

Why I don't put much credence into statistical analysis of pop music, is that such analysis tends to lack any objectivity. It's bad enough trying to detect trends in music generally, while always needing to contend with cultural biases. But it is I think easier to focus on the form and function of the music itself. Whereas analysis of pop music tends to be driven by commerce, the drive to reduce and distill it with the goal of selling more of it to people. This IMO makes most such analysis fundamentally dishonest and inaccurate. The techniques of an artist are inherently more fundamental to formal understanding of their work than the demographics of their audience.

diasporos · Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 7:18 am Post subject:

Well argued, CJ. I'm adding what ZoeB said about abundance/distribution/internet explosion to what you said about statistical futility in arguing anything about commerce music. I'm summing these thoughts up in my head like this:

The commerce music makers can't be observed objectively as their music is driven by market forces so to form statistical observations about the 'content', 'form', 'function' and to compare these observations to past music is useless since all those elements are tainted by the market demand/supply dynamic. Trend-driven music content is artificial and formless.

The 'free inventor' of music is a rapidly growing organism infecting the market, not driven by the market yet changing it.

Looking at the machinery of music objectively we might be able to slowly notice a shift in the complexity of form and function as more and more 'free inventors' break out and start to influence the market's demand for new ideas/complexity etc.