Ask Slashdot: Will Technology Disrupt the Song? 158
An anonymous reader writes: The music industry has gone through dramatic changes over the past thirty years. Virtually everything is different except the structure of the songs we listen to. Distribution methods have long influenced songwriting habits, from records to CDs to radio airplay. So will streaming services, through their business models, incentivize a change to song form itself? Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios, and the shift to digital is providing them with ever more data about what people like to listen to. And don't forget that technology is a now a central part of how such music is created, from auto-tune and electronic beats to the massive amount of processing that goes into getting the exact sound a studio wants.
Will Technology Disrupt the Song? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. No it won't.
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There were short musical pieces before the invention of audio recording, you know.
Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? (Score:4, Funny)
Are you joking? Technology has always disrupted the nature of music. Early forms of recording were very short in duration and essentially dictated the time lenggh of their contents. Popular music has had to conform to the technology, and arguably is permanently changed. How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?
Uh, let's not use time as a measure or indication of quality or intent, shall we?
I'm a bit too afraid that the attention span of today will start handing out Oscars for Vine videos.
Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for how streaming services will affect music - I think a lot of the pressures they put on writers are similar to radio. They work better with shorter pieces of music that are free-standing in the sense that they will work when played between any two other songs. So, less emphasis on things like thematic consistency (both in lyrics and music). Really the only thing I see different in streaming (vs. radio) is that in streaming it's easier to skip a particular song, so the listener is able to shut himself out more from experimentation. He can decide within 15 seconds if a song presents a sound he deems to be acceptable, and whether he wants to skip it. Whereas on the radio, he would be "forced" to listen to the whole track. I don't think this will be much of an issue though, since radio stations as well as streaming services both usually cater to a specific genre anyway - they're certainly not hotbeds of experimentation.
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Also probably due to the genre but one of my favorite bands, Opeth, has an average song length of probably 9min. They have a whole bunch of songs 12+ min long. I've never heard them on radio but did hear an a snippet from one of their softer songs in a CSI episode I think it was. I don't listen to the radio because generally it doesn't play the type of music I like. Sure with online I could search around for a station somewhere that plays it but being online I can just listen to the things I like in the fir
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They are prog without sounding like they are trying to be prog, which most bands in that genre can't do well.
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After the last two albums, I find myself wishing for more metal to go with the prog.
Glad to see Opeth mentioned. Given all the intelligence, machismo, and aggression on this site I'm always disappointed to see that progressive metal rarely comes up in music discussions.
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I agree with a lot of your comments. What I miss about radio is discovering new stuff. That said my tastes lean away from mass market stuff. Not that I hate all of it but the current Lady Gaga song or whatever being played once an hour means 1) I listen to crap I don't like and 2) I don't really discover new music that I want to listen to anyways.
So I rely on friends and concert festivals to find new bands. Because my stuff isn't played on the radio often by the time I discover a band they've put out 6 albu
Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? (Score:5, Informative)
Time is 100% relevant to this discussion. Music history is littered with examples of songs that have had their structure and duration altered as a result of outside forces. [snip] While radio stations aren't as anal about running times these days, you still won't hear a 10-minute song on the radio. And there's no disputing that that particular limitation had a deep effect on much of the music of the previous century.
Yes, and no. You're right that media constraints often try to keep songs shorter. But that doesn't imply that longer songs would be that common, even without those constraints.
Examine most of music history. Whether you're talking about 14th-century French chansons, 16th-century Italian madrigals, 18th-century independent arias, 19th-century German lieder, or 20th-century pop (or Broadway or jazz or...) -- ALL of those repertoires tend to have songs that average about 3-5 minutes in length, with some that might go 6-7 minutes, rare ones that are 7-10 minutes, and almost none more than 10 minutes. Individual movements of larger classical works often follow a similar pattern.
(The main exception are certain kinds of folk ballades or epic ballades which have many, many verses because they tell a long story. But in that case, the actual form of the music takes a "back seat" to the story -- essentially after the 5th or 6th verse, it's kind of a recitation formula which loses its musical impact. A related form is repetitive chanting, where the music becomes less important than the ritualistic experience of repeating the music again and again.)
It's surprising that TFA seems to be written by a songwriting professor, because he seems to understand little about these long-term trends and what they say about basic cognitive patterns that relate to musical structure.
Effective musical composition is really about balancing two things: repetition and novelty. That's it. Seriously. If you write a song that NEVER repeats a refrain or a musical phrase or a short "motive" of a few notes or even a basic rhythmic pattern, you end up with something that just sounds like "random notes." In fact, you have to work quite hard to write something that has no repetitive patterns at all. And it gives a listener a little pleasure in hearing something familiar again -- you "know how that part goes," and that recognition about how it sounds and how the phrase is going to play out is comforting and satisfying.
On the other hand, outside of dance music (again, a pattern going back roughly a thousand years for dance music), too much repetition makes a piece boring. If you keep playing the same few notes over and over again, it gets tedious.
Composers over the centuries have settled on a number of standard forms for putting together songs, because they effectively balance repetition and novelty -- often through varied repetition (or elements where one thing is repeated, like the harmony, but the melody over top of it is varied somewhat).
Lots of songs, for example, use a "song form" of AABA for verses. Why? Because the first time we hear A, it's unfamiliar and new. When we hear A again, it's a welcome repetition -- we get to feel like we "know how this goes." So why not do A a third time? Because it starts to get boring -- so we do a B section that contrasts and often introduces some drama/tension (or changes the feel or dynamics at least in some way). And then, to finish it off, we do a return to A (often with a little variation or a little shorter than the first time) -- which again satisfies because it's familiar... it kind of releases the tension introduced by the contrasting B.
That may be a structure for a verse, but entire songs often have a similar structure: verse-refrain-verse-refrain-BRIDGE-refrain, where each "verse-refrain" unit is kind of like a big "A," the bridge introduces contrast, and then the final return to the refrain (often transformed or at a higher energy level) provides a satisfying conclusion
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A big part of the reason why you don't hear many 10-minute songs on the radio or elsewhere is because it's SIGNIFICANTLY harder to write a piece like that which is satisfying, doesn't get boring, and is also simple enough in structure to remain interesting upon first listening. Similarly you don't hear many songs less the 1-2 minutes long because you don't have enough time to develop anything interesting enough to have a satisfying "narrative journey" for a listener.
There aren't temporary trends -- they're pretty basic to human experience in general which has been consistent for centuries. Has the author of TFA never listened to Broadway songs, let alone historical music? Has he not noticed that the same song lengths and structural patterns tend to occur there, where the constraints of media and radio play are less relevant?
I couldn't agree more about "there aren't temporary trends". Human enjoyment of music is pretty much as you explain it.
However I have to point out that this renewed focus on short songs is strange, being that going back to the beginning of 20th century pop music, songs were regularly 2-3 minutes in length. Take "Michelle" by The Beatles for example. It clocks in at 2:40. Sheer brilliance in less than three minutes. Short songs are nothing new.
On the flip side we have a band like Rush that has con
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However I have to point out that this renewed focus on short songs is strange, being that going back to the beginning of 20th century pop music, songs were regularly 2-3 minutes in length.
Definitely true. I was mostly responding to GP, who was arguing about how songs are artificially shortened.
But you're absolutely right that short songs have a long history too, though again there are limits. There are plenty of songs in the 2-3 minute range, but very few less than 2 minutes. And, aside from "novelty songs" (or very fast tempo songs) and advertising jingles and such, songs less than 60-90 seconds are exceptionally rare.
Thus, I find TFA's discussion of the possibility of artists repl
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Great post.
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Record albums are kind of the pop equivalent of a symphony. They last roughly the same time, the length of a CD. It's a myth that it was chosen to be the length of Beethoven's 9th, but the intuition seems to be about right: that's about how long people are willing to listen to music before they need a break.
Not all albums are constructed well, but a good album has some kind of structure and forms a complete unit of music, rather than just being a bunch of songs. It's about as unified as the movements of a s
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There are many songs that simply have multiple parts (i.e. if you heard the parts separately you may not guess they were the same song). You also have "songs" like symphonies in which the sub-songs are meant to be played in order. This is similar to albums that are meant to be played as a whole. Then you also have music like Indian Classical Music which is typically 30 - 60 minutes long for a raga.
So yes, no one wants to be bored to death listening to the same thing for 10 minutes, but that doesn't mean
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There's plenty of trash on Slashdot these days, but it's refreshing to read a solid, well written and informative comment like yours.
Thanks.
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Donovan had to make a decision when recording "Hurdy Gurdy Man" whether to include all 3 verses he wrote, or 2 verses and a guitar solo, as there wasn't time to have 3 verses plus a solo within 3 minutes. The Byrds had loads of songs where even more verses were cut out to keep them down to a radio-friendly length.
Yes, the radio version and the LP version, may they never meet!
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The musicians are paid per song. So they have no motivation to make 10 minute songs like American Pie. They have more motivation to make little 2 minute ditties like As Tears Go By and most songs less than 3 minutes, for this reason it seems.
If money is all they care about, then become a banker, for I struggle to call you an artist.
I get what you're saying, but this IS the problem with defining an artist these days. Money is THE priority. When that happens, the ability to express yourself beyond a mathematically calculated attention span becomes impossible.
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I agree. A true artist makes their art for themselves FIRST and enjoys the fact that others like it too second.
Of course with rock music, it also plays to helping ugly guys get laid too, but that's another thread.
But in most cases, trying to pander to the money or follow it over
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With the attention spans the current litter of hiptarded fucksters have, a typical pop ditty seems to them like 2112 or Shine On You Crazy Diamond to a normal person.
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That would explain songs like All by The Descendents and Art by Nuclear Assault. You could play both songs, back to back twice in fifteen seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating. Okay, maybe sixteen seconds. Art is at least funny.
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Most on
Short songs are nothing new.
Look at most of the early Beatles catalog. Those were short(and sweet) songs.
The length of a song doesn't dictate it's quality.
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The Doors were the ones to pretty much break the two minute barrier. Songs two minutes long were pretty much all that got radio play. They broke that because they had music people wanted to hear even though it was longer than two minutes. Short songs is not new. Densmore discusses it in his book and it is discussed in the book The Doors though I have forgotten the author's name - the one with the yellow and red cover with a bad depiction of Jim on it.
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Ray Charles kind of did, too, with What'd I Say, but he kind of stood alone with that one. The Doors made it stick.
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How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?
How many songs that predate recordings and are longer than five minutes can you think of?
I have two giant books of old songs. The first is a collection of 975 Finnish folk songs that was originally published in 1905. I haven't made a statistical analysis, but the vast majority of them have 2-5 verses. With 30 seconds per verse that would be 2.5 minutes. There are a few dozens of songs longer than five minutes in it.
The other is a collection of German 803 student songs. Though, they seem to be on average lon
Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song? (Score:2)
Zis vas ze trondheim hammer dance, vich is heard every tventy-five minutes in ze town of Trondheim in Norway, in vich ze old ladies are struck about ze head vith round sticks, or klugels (click)
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The song has a natural form of about 3 minutes
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A whole slew of stuff from Beethoven and Mozart comes readily to mind...
Mostly not 'songs' though. A Mozart opera might be a couple of hours long, but the majority of the individual arias are probably under 5 minutes, e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/playli... [youtube.com]
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"Mostly not 'songs' though. A Mozart opera might be a couple of hours long, but the majority of the individual arias are probably under 5 minutes"
Yes, an arbitrary under-5-minutes cut of a longer composition, be it an opera, a sonate or a symphonic concert lasts, well uh, under 5 minutes.
The point is that when you think "opera", you are thinking "two hours"; when you think "concert", you are thinking "forty minutes"; when you think "sonate", you are thinking "twenty minutes"... heck, even if you think "lied
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Well I'd say now a days it is probably more due to advertisement. Keeping the song around 3min gives you enough time to play 3 "songs" do a weather update and the plug boner pills again.
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No those might have had actual technical limitations length of a record/phonograph for example.
Another possibility: maybe song length for pop songs is self-limiting. People hate to hear songs they don't like. If they have 10min of a song they like and then 10min of a song they don't they'll change the dial. But if you keep them short they'll rid them out like a lot of people do with commercials.
Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think it's an arbitrary cut (at least not until you get to, say, Wagner, where selections really do tend to look like 'bleeding chunks'). In earlier operas, there's usually a pretty clear distinction between recitative and aria, not that much different to the songs in a musical today (or even the singles from a 'concept album'). Of course you can argue that composers with a bit of business sense had an eye on the technology of the time - popular arias were sold individually as sheet music, and later as records - I've seen the 78 described (in the LP era) as 'still the ideal medium for a Puccini-length aria'. Puccini died in 1924, and many of his arias were the early hits of the gramophone. Short-form music has always been popular, though. How many popular folk songs go on for more than 5 minutes? In church music, the choir may tackle longer form works, but the hymns the congregation sings generally aren't much longer than a pop single.
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However, to answer your question - " How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?"
A few:
Voodoo Chile - Jimi Hendrix
I heard it through the grapevine - CCR
I can do anything for love (but won't do that) - Meatloaf
Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
Inna Gadda Da Vida - Max Webster
Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan
Hotel California - The Eagles
Amer
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A lot of the longer songs also had "chopped" versions that were used for radio play. Especially if they had long drum solos or the like.
Although Attention Deficit Disorder is pretty much the order of the day these days, even back in simpler times, pop radio favored short songs over longer ones. If a particular number didn't amuse the listener, then keeping them short ensured that the listener would be less likely to switch to a different station, since the chances of something more agreeable coming along sh
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Early songs were the length they were. People regularly played "little ditties" that were a couple of minutes because people like to change up what they're doing (and who they're doing it with) while dancing. Recording technology has nothing to do with the length of songs. Dancing, and human emotions have everything to do with it. That's why operas take longer than the latest Britney Spears song. A Sinatra song lasted about the same as a Britney Spears song does, though. Rock music typically lasts a l
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Disrupt no, change yes and it always will. Globalization will also change it.
When they started to make drums they found a way to make music louder so it can be heard hundreds of meters away. So music changed.
Additional instruments created new sound so the singer wasn't always needed. Then we have forms where the singer emulates the sound of the instrument.
We get to the point were instruments can be fine tuned then music can be played as written allowing wider distribution of music.
Streaming will change mus
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No. No it won't.
It already has. Just not for the better. What I know for sure is that I haven't bought, torrented, or otherwise listened to new music in years. I listen to old AC/DC, Queen, Stones, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. but can't change the radio fast enough when new crap comes on.
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Shut your whore mouth! (Score:3, Funny)
Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios,
WHAT?! What a corruption of the traditions of our country's musical heritage. Give me the organic groups-- the Monkees, Menudo, One Direction, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, NKOB, the Spice Girls.. you know, talented musicians who found each other and came together through the music.
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"That's not music, Martelli....That's masturbation."
-Fame, 1980
Re:Shut your whore mouth! (Score:5, Funny)
You might notice that most of the artists you named here were terrible.
FTFY
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Whoooooooooooosh
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WHAT?! What a corruption of the traditions of our country's musical heritage. Give me the organic groups-- the Monkees, Menudo, One Direction, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, NKOB, the Spice Girls.. you know, talented musicians who found each other and came together through the music.
You might notice that most of the artists you named here were from long ago.
You might notice that all of the artists named were bands put together by music companies.
You might also notice a whooshing sound.
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Meh (Score:3)
Corporations will continue to make boatloads of money, artists will continue to sell their work for a song.
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That's what I don't get. We already have the infrastructure in place for artists to "make it" on their own - no record label company needed. A friend of mine put a few of her self-produced educational videos [youtube.com] on YouTube hoping for some publicity - maybe someone at a TV station would see them and pick up the series or offer her a job. Instead, the videos grew insanely popular among parents. The YouT
Music has been about tech for decades (Score:2)
Most popular music was a result in changes in technology that allowed for new sounds. Elvis and The Beetles couldn't have made their sound a decade before due to differences in the technology of microphones, recording and playback equipment. The same is true for many of the groups that produced top hits and most major groups in the last 9 decades had a tehcnological edge over the music they replaced.
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Most popular music was a result in changes in technology that allowed for new sounds. Elvis and The Beetles couldn't have made their sound a decade before due to differences in the technology of microphones, recording and playback equipment. The same is true for many of the groups that produced top hits and most major groups in the last 9 decades had a tehcnological edge over the music they replaced.
So, this generation of "music" makers, armed with the best Autotune sound mixers and Photoshop artists, along with the algorithms that prove what RPM will drive the most money out of a background bass track, is proving exactly what today? That technology can replace the artist?
Seriously, where do we go from here? How long before the musical overlords simply ask the computer to calculate the next beat and vocal pitch based on revenue?
Enjoy technology. Don't worry though, hologram Elvis will be touring so
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This type of thing has been investigated going back to at least the 1970s, although at that time they were doing things like shuffling cards with phrases written on them instead of using a software random number generator to pick which elements end up in the composition. It seems to be easier to apply these techniques to ambient music, like was done with the music in Spore, than to pop music, at least currently. Though there do appear to be more examples than I'm familiar
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Typically, music is measured in BPM, not RPM.
True, unless you were more referring to the 45RPM and 78RPM records that were spun at such a rate as to limit the amount of recording time on them..
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Technology won't replace the actual artists, just the hacks and copycats. The artists are the ones doing new and interesting things with the technology, instead of just cranking out clones of successful things.
I doubt it.
It seems like when people try to understand the "key factors which make a successful song/mo
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Did you mean The Roches?
Already has (Score:5, Interesting)
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The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.
Yeah.
It would be a shame to allow shitty encoding to ruin the beautiful sounds of an Autotuned voice.
Re:Already has (Score:4, Insightful)
That's more a result of auto-tune and the loudness war. Actually this whole thing started in the late 80s, with 1990 being about the tipping point.
Before 1990 people tended to write lyrics and then set them to music. The music was built around what the vocalist could sing, because clearly the lead can only make one sound at a time and has to breathe from time to time. Then sampling became popular and people started to sample and layer up vocals, stitching them together in a way that no vocalist could repeat in real life, and applying effects to them.
People who sing will be familiar with this, especially if they do a lot of covers of popular songs (e.g. karaoke). A lot of post 1990 stuff is very hard to do live, if not impossible.
Later we got auto-tune. That lets people do ridiculous things with their voices, because they can hit notes effortlessly and it becomes more like playing an instrument than actually singing. Add the loudness war in and you get lots of distortion and ringing added into the vocal mix. Real time effects are standard too.
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A lot of post 1990 stuff is very hard to do live, if not impossible.
Later we got auto-tune. That lets people do ridiculous things with their voices, because they can hit notes effortlessly and it becomes more like playing an instrument than actually singing. Add the loudness war in and you get lots of distortion and ringing added into the vocal mix. Real time effects are standard too.
Some great points - which '90's music do you mean?
I'm the lead vocalist in a band and we just recorded an album. I can't stand auto tunas personally and forbid them in the studio - even for back-up singers. Everyone has to be physically fit and my mates tell me I can sing high enough to sound like a chick - if I want to. We have used technology to drive the recording process pretty hard to achieve dynamic range in the recordings for precisely the reasons you cite. I'm so happy people are starting to reali
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Re:Already has (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung.
Correcting a singer who can't hold a specific pitch is expanding their vocal range! Maybe from zero to something, but still.
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Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung.
Correcting a singer who can't hold a specific pitch is expanding their vocal range! Maybe from zero to something, but still.
What about in a live setting if the singer is tired or sick and needs help delivering a 'usual' performance as opposed to trying to record a performance that just isn't there? Isn't that what they were made for initially?
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What about in a live setting if the singer is tired or sick and needs help delivering a 'usual' performance as opposed to trying to record a performance that just isn't there? Isn't that what they were made for initially?
Yes. That's the idea. Still true, though. Vocal range can change from day to day.
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What I mean is that, for example, often one line ends and the next begins too fast for any normal person to breathe. Rap has some extreme examples of this. I recall a live performance by Eminem a few years ago where he sang most of each line but then had someone else cover the last couple of words so that he could get enough oxygen for the next line.
There is a lot of other marginal stuff that can be sung but you need to re-arrange the music a fair bit for it to sound good. That's one of the reasons why kara
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What I mean is that, for example, often one line ends and the next begins too fast for any normal person to breathe. Rap has some extreme examples of this. I recall a live performance by Eminem a few years ago where he sang most of each line but then had someone else cover the last couple of words so that he could get enough oxygen for the next line.
Maybe the guy was too out of shape to produce a performance? I remember seeing System of a Down not so long ago, when I thought it was dubious they could deliver however they delivered a massive unstoppable two hour set. There is no way a person can deliver those performances if they aren't at the top of their game physically and mentally.
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Autotune can only do so much.
UK readers may have seen an episode of The One Show about it, they just couldn't get Adrian Chiles to sound right.
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Autotune can only do so much.
Actually, you'd be amazed at what some of the modern vocal effects can do, especially with a well trained engineer/producer. Antares [antarestech.com], for example, can do everything from change the pitch/time, to alter the vocal characteristics of the track using things like "throat modeling". They can generate harmonies complete with tiny imperfections to make it sound more "human", They can make a voice have more "rasp" or "smokiness", so when you hear guys screaming (think Chris Cornell) and you think "how can
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Rubbish. I can strum about three chords from memory and six if I study them before playing.
The only way you could make me sound like Clapton, Page or Blackmore would be to erase all my shit and record them over the top.
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When I watch a movie at home, to turn it up to be able to hear the dialogue whispers, the "loud" parts disturb the neighbors. When "loudness wars" come in, the volume difference between a whisper and an explosion are smaller. Less "realistic", but far more practical.
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The crooning typical of music prior to that came about through the ability of microphones to pick up nuances in tone. Prior to this it was just a bunch of guys playing and singing as loudly as they could to try to get the sound recorded on wax.
The last major fight over the structure of music was 30 years ago when everyone was fighting over the right to sample. This, by and large, was due to the fact that for the first
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The other scary thing is, if you played back the MP3 and the original lossless source material, you'll find the new crowd prefers the lossy encoded one.
I'm not saying using LAME on 256+VBR, but crappy encoded 128kbps stuff w
Technology isn't killing music (Score:5, Funny)
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Needs a bit more Cowell!
Hang on...
Why would anyone bother listening to radio music (Score:2)
these days when there is more free and independent music on the internet. When I found http://www.ektoplazm.com/ [ektoplazm.com] I was lost in there for week discovering tons of free EM. Yes not everyone cup of tea but its like shopping for cd to discover new artists except you get to hear the music first and not waste your money.
Because radio isn't just about music (Score:2)
Its about the DJ banter, weather & traffic news etc. If I wanted to listen to wall to wall music I'd put my collection on, but sometimes its nice to hear a live human voice between the tracks and to be surprised by a track I'd probably never have streamed or downloaded myself.
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Really? Because I think DJ banter is one of the most annoying things you could possibly hear on the radio.
Other than hearing the same song 5 times in a day every time I find myself in a car (this actually happened on my last vacation).
It was like "why the hell is it that every time I start this car that song is playing on the radio?" I had to find a new radio station.
Albums (Score:2)
We might see the concept of an album die out. in the digital world its just as easy to release a song a month as it is an album a year.
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So looking at relea
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Albums might become less important commercially, as far as many people will be buying individual tracks, not a whole CD. But when you look at what was released all throughout the CD era (and before), most albums were already just collections of standalone songs. The Pink-Floydian concept album was always the exception, not the norm. The norm was taking a half dozen songs that had in fact already been released as 45 rpm singles, padding them with some filler, and releasing it as an album.
Whilst this is true for a lot manufactured pop, with forms of music that had the artist sing and play as well as write different albums have different sounds. The Colour and the Shape from the Foo Fighters sounds very different from Nothing Left to Lose and the albums were only separated by 2 years and this is very different from Sonic Highways (their latest album).
So yeah, someone who has their music written for them and autotuned will benefit from releasing songs on a staggered timetable, but bands who
I'm confused. (Score:3)
Learn Something Very Old (Score:3, Interesting)
I dislike these medium.com articles as much as anybody, but there is a whopper of an Easter Egg in it.
It's that picture at the top- bits of a Score written in some kind of Latin. (There are many kinds...)
This comes from the commissioned, by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, work of one Florentius de Faxolis, a 15th century Priest and Musical Scholar.
He had written a work on Music Theory for the Cardinal, on what makes _Good_ _Music_.
I once read some of the Book, at Berkeley. It emphasized short pieces, repetition, and simple melodies. (I had to have my God-Daughter translate some of the more obscure parts. The Latin in the commentary was difficult.)
It was written in Manuscript form; the only widely distributed printed edition is only five years old.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674049437
How relevant is this (Score:2)
Originality (Score:2)
Disruption would require innovation; I don't expect we'll see any of that from the music industry in the foreseeable future.
Instant feedback.... (Score:2)
Studios will continue to manufacture music but the instant feedback will drive the future trends. Studios will replicate songs that sell the best and slowly build up enough data to know what we like. I predict that this will result in convergence around a single specific melody. Then they can just insert any generic hot girl (or guy, it won't matter at that point) onto the stage and just autotune them to ensure they sing the same song.
Oh and everything is awesome.
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Oh, you mean like hip-hop.
Mellow greetings, citizen (Score:2)
What seems to be your boggle? [youtube.com]
Create your own song adventure (Score:2)
In the same way, I always like hearing a song which takes an unanticipated turn.
Ex-Yahoo Jay Frank saw this coming in 2009 (Score:2)
Music Industry Exists because of Technology (Score:2)
The industry itself needs to realize that the era of printed media recordings (LPs, tape, CDs) is over and those record profits will never happen again. The era of digital purchases was also brief and now we're moving into the er
solution: product placement (Score:2)
Hey Coke & Walmart? I'll name drop your company into my next hip-hop song, guaranteeing tens of listeners.
Blasting my ears (Score:2)
What amazes me is that the more technology and information we get, the more the music seems to become harsh and random to listen to. All the pop music that has flowed down from dubstep is so jarring...just random ear-raping sounds firing at the listener. This is to say nothing of lyrics which seem to be getting more and more repetitive and less and less creative/sonically flowing.
I'm not saying this to necessarily criticize pop as being simple and vapid, which has been the case since pop has existed and i
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What amazes me is that the more technology and information we get, the more the music seems to become harsh and random to listen to. All the pop music that has flowed down from dubstep is so jarring...just random ear-raping sounds firing at the listener. This is to say nothing of lyrics which seem to be getting more and more repetitive and less and less creative/sonically flowing.
The industry loves things like Dubstep because it can be produced on a computer and the "artist" (using this term very loosely) is just an actor and can be replaced if need be. Not that the art of replacing band members in pop groups is a new concept either. Their ultimate goal is to replace the human component forever, that way they dont have to pay them their 10%, beyond this people tend to have opinions that aren't popular, develop drug habits, get old/ugly. Virtual pop stars are the wet dream of the mus
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That's a great point about sound quality, actually, I think you're on to something there. Some of the harsher music gets tamed by poor quality playback equipment and encoding. The listener loses a lot of the dynamic aspects of the music, so add tons of compression and nuclear-computer-tones to overcome those limitations. People who listen with better setups have their ears melted off, but it doesn't sound too terrible on what 99% of people are listening to it on.
On the one hand... (Score:2)
it won't, because the studios have always wanted assembly-line music, with musicians being interchangeable and replaceable, like parts in your car., and they've worked long and hard for that. (Such as the singers for Tin Pan Alley, and many of the groups that got played on American Bandstand)(They screwed up, early on, with the Monkees, who were actually real musicians....)
On the other hand, if someone goes viral, they will attempt to buy them, or create a cheaper clone, and will water down what they sing a
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That said, what I have heard of Lorde, which is probably only two or three songs, doesn't sound especially overproduced, but I don't know if they've tweaked anything t
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Thank you for the reminder! I did nearly forget!
Its been that way since our distant ancestors found that banging a stick on a log was a great enhancement to just wailing
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http://www.merriam-webster.com... [merriam-webster.com]
First Known Use of INCENTIVIZE
1970
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My teenaged daughter mostly plays vocaloid songs on our long, long car rides. Yamaha owns the vocaloid technology
http://www.yamaha.com/about_ya... [yamaha.com]
They even made a keyboard synthesizer only available in Japan that's specific to producing vocaloid music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]