How long do you think this can go on until there is a 'correction' to this with more musical textures? And do you think Hip Hop and Dance music had a hand in this, or was this just corporate tinkering?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/26/us-science-music-idUSBRE86P0R820120726

(Reuters) - Comforting news for anyone over the age of 35, scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.

Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.

A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.

"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse," Serra told Reuters. "In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."

They also found the so-called timbre palette has become poorer. The same note played at the same volume on, say, a piano and a guitar is said to have a different timbre, so the researchers found modern pop has a more limited variety of sounds.

Intrinsic loudness is the volume baked into a song when it is recorded, which can make it sound louder than others even at the same volume setting on an amplifier.

The music industry has long been accused of ramping up the volume at which songs are recorded in a 'loudness war' but Serra says this is the first time it has been properly measured using a large database.

The study, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, offers a handy recipe for musicians in a creative drought.

Old tunes re-recorded with increased loudness, simpler chord progressions and different instruments could sound new and fashionable. The Rolling Stones in their 50th anniversary year should take note.

(Reporting by Chris Wickham)

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http://adevotedappraisal.tumblr.com - Essays, reviews, short stories and free writes on music, film and life around us.

It's pretty obvious. The difference in songwriting between 1975 Stevie Wonder and 2012 Nicki MInaj is absolutely startling.

What happened to our big pop artists? People are allergic to talent these days, it seems.

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http://adevotedappraisal.tumblr.com - Essays, reviews, short stories and free writes on music, film and life around us.

I'm not surprised by the findings. All you have to do is go back and listen to Pop music from decades past until now, and you can hear how bland the chords are now in comparison, how lack of "bands" have a role in the blandness, and how much more generic pop music has become in general. I'm aware that throughout music history you've always had "biters" trying to capitalize on the hot trends, yet I wonder if the level of frequency in biting has increased as a reason for the music sounding the same. I've read about the "loudness" war in a few threads here and it also makes sense. It's good to finally have some kind of evidence of these things that have been going on for a while.

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I'm not really Mr Chords+melody but the lack of variety in sounds-both within and between songs-is something quite obvious I think. And there's really no excuse for this because "everything" should be possible in terms of sound on synthesizers and computers.

more melodies and experimentation, but instead alot of producers just use it to competently mimic whatever is currently hot. It's weird.

I've been recently looking at the tutorials for Ableton live, and the more the narrator explains, the more I'm confused as to why music is so static and same-sounding. I can't really blame multi-nationals like i'd like to.

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http://adevotedappraisal.tumblr.com - Essays, reviews, short stories and free writes on music, film and life around us.

That music created by machines would all end up sounding the same?

It's inevitable when most pop songs are in 4/4 time signature, about 115 BPM and use the same basic chords (A, Am, C, D, E, Em, F, F# and G).

~Austin

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I mean, if you remove thevocals, many modern day songs just has drums and a keyboard-riff (the bass is just there). While harmony is still relevant in a horizontal aspect (=the keyboard lines outling minor or major chords), the vertical aspect (=hearing root, thir4d, fifth, maybe4 even 7th or 9th at the *same* time) has almost been lost completely. Of course, stuff like Hip-Hop or even metal has predated this but still; if you want to hear pop-songs tha44t have SOME level of sophistication, the sound of today doesn't have too much to offer beyond novel sounds (¤think autotune and maybe the euro-keyboard sounds soiund fresh to americans 4but as4 a 444eu444rope4a0n, i0t's ha4r4d4 t4o get excite4d..444444444.

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“The other dude after me didn’t help my case. It was just like…crazy nigga factory going on.”
Dre makes no apologies for his own eccentricities. “I was young, and searching, trying to find myself,” he says. “Never did.”-- Andre B

meaning:

OK you have "evidence" but that doesn't help you determine why it happens?

I can think of several theories...

shift in the requirement for actual musical training (playing instruments, trained singers)

the affect of using electronic instrumentation (reduction in variety of instrumentsused)

changes in the tastes of listeners

costs vs return associated with creating more sonically diverse music

etc

There used to be a whole bunch of major labels; now there are four, soon to be three.

There used to be thousands of independent radio stations; now a city is lucky to have one, because Clear Channel bought most of them.

Artists with weird, unconventional singing voices used to be commonplace; now American Idol defines for us what's good.

Region and sound used to be inextricably linked.

the pervasive use of headphones *could* have an affect on the loudness factor (perhaps our hearing is getting worse because of that)

*shrug*

point really was

now they need to start figuring out WHY

I think it is a combination of alot of the factors you raised, but putting those factors in order of most impact to the simplifying of music is difficult, and something I think music criticism should focus more on.

It could end up being something out the way, like the increase in work hours for people over the past couple decade that would give them less time to craft complex melodies versus simple ones, or lack of exposure to classical music in childhood, who knows.

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Bowls
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nm

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The title is inaccurate.

Even tho these claims are completely subjective they will give themselves hernias attempting to validate their hate.


It's completely pointless to run a 'study' on something non-empirical such as music.

above a certain age about current music.

but youre right, its subjective. although i tend to give credence to
the study, since it supports with my opinion

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“The other dude after me didn’t help my case. It was just like…crazy nigga factory going on.”
Dre makes no apologies for his own eccentricities. “I was young, and searching, trying to find myself,” he says. “Never did.”-- Andre B

meanwhile the lesson is jumping on euro-trap

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“The other dude after me didn’t help my case. It was just like…crazy nigga factory going on.”
Dre makes no apologies for his own eccentricities. “I was young, and searching, trying to find myself,” he says. “Never did.”-- Andre B

The various news articles really misrepresent what the article is, I think, getting at... the study makes two points, not one, and I think both are important:

1) If you do all sorts of crazy scientific measurement stuff of tone/pitch, timbre, and loudness in popular music *over a fifty-five year period*, you see a very stable "language" or set of patterns that are very consistent across genre and time. The researchers assert that this "points to a great degree of conventionalism" in western pop music, which makes sense. That sort of abstract language becomes a sort of standard amongst listeners, and music is judged by *both* how it fits within and varies from the standard. I don't think the researchers are making any value judgement here, but rather trying to understand consistencies in the structure of pop music: in other words, what makes pop music pop music?

2) The second point is what the media has picked up. I'll quote that passage in full:
"Much of the gathered evidence points towards an important degree of conventionalism, in the sense of blockage or no-evolution, in the creation and production of contemporary western popular music. Thus, from a global perspective, popular music would have no clear trends and show no considerable changes in more than fifty years. Pitch codeword frequencies are found to be always under the same underlying pattern: a power law with the same exponent and fitting parameters. Moreover, frequency-based rankings of pitch codewords are practically identical, and several of the network metrics for pitch, timbre, and loudness remain immutable. Frequency distributions for timbre and loudness also fall under a universal pattern: a power law and a reversed log-normal distribution, respectively. However, these distributions' parameters do substantially change with years. In addition, some metrics for pitch networks clearly show a progression. Thus, beyond the global perspective, we observe a number of trends in the evolution of contemporary popular music. These point towards less variety in pitch transitions, towards a consistent homogenization of the timbral palette, and towards louder and, in the end, potentially poorer volume dynamics."

I don't really read this as saying "all new music sounds the same," which is how the media is interpreting it. Rather, the language that popular music uses today - and remember, that language is necessarily built on conventions - is less varied *when compared to a larger set of data that had already confirmed the presence of a relatively stable musical language*.

In other words: yes, pop music might be trending toward "homogenization" in some ways, but that doesn't mean "it all sounds the same" ... it means the frequency and diversity of elements that are used in the structure of a given song, and the way a listener might perceive it, have changed.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

"I love the shit that's out there now, so I have to find something to validate my tastes"

not saying that's what you're doing but the tone makes it read that way

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CHOP-THESE-BITCHES!!!!
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Garhart Ivanhoe Poppwell
Un-OK'd moderator for The Lesson and Make The Music (yes, I do's work up in here, and in your asscrease if you run foul of this

I actually think the study is really interesting - but I think it's being read in a very particular way that conforms with the "pop music has gone downhill" narrative... that's certainly not what the researchers are getting at (I don't think anyway).

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~