Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder? (2012)
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
The author of the article highlights a potential bias with this study which is worth pointing out:
But I did wonder if there was a selection bias in play here. The Million Song Dataset, huge as it is, may not provide a representative slice of pop music, especially for old songs. Its contents are heavily weighted to modern music: the database contains only 2,650 songs released between 1955 and 1959, but nearly two orders of magnitude more—177,808 songs—released between 2005 and 2009. That’s because it draws on what’s popular now, as well as what has been digitized and made available for download. And the songs of yesteryear that people enjoy today (as oldies) may not be the same ones that people enjoyed when those songs first came out.
It also echoes my (baseless) assumption that the main reason that we have this idea that music a few decades ago or more was somehow "better" is that anything that wasn't at least above average is completely forgotten by now i.e. survivorship bias.
1. Pure nostalgia.
2. The selection effect.
3. I've grown more tolerant. I now happily (though not ecstatically) bop along to songs which I hated back in their heyday. Ice, ice, baby...
Probably (3) is actually partly nostalgia as well. But it is also that I am not as caught up in the petty jealousies and genre-fan-feuds that I had been as a lad.
I realize that it's no less cheesy or annoying but it's familiar enough yet I've not heard it in a couple of years. I can get down with a lot of music but hearing the same damn mediocre song every week, it goes from "eh, whatever" to "dear god why is this still around??"
Where does the idea that music output is equally good in all ages comes from?
The fine art world, and the literary world know very well from historical experience of centuries that there are periods of huge masterpieces and lots of great creators, and periods of drought. Heck, the classical music world knows that too.
Why would this not hold in the pop music world?
Music is another activity that is historically influenced by period, trends, culture, etc, and all of these have their ups and downs.
Whenever I see discussion on classical music, it's a fun mental game for me to imagine it's a forum for metal instead, and these (assumingly) well-to-do academics are all metalheads who have a strangely archaic way of describing the specific merits of songs.
I don't think that's much of a concern in practice. We celebrate lots of works that people didn't find particularly noteworthy at the time but were appreciated at a later age (Bach, for example, was out of fashion and nearly forgotten for a century or more after his death, Satie was not especially appreciated at his time, there are lots of other examples). In other fields too, e.g. consider Van Gogh.
Most of the works of obscure composers are known to fans of classical music (and musicologists), they are still occasionally played, but are still considered ho-hum.
I'd say good works tend to rise to the top, even if they're not popular at their time.
I think one way these articles could be more honest is if they did not compare the survivors to all modern top 40 hits, but rather to the most curated selection of culturally-relevant and generation-defining songs. I'm sure any avid listener to any genre/time period could find you 10 songs that will make you reconsider your perhaps preconceived negative opinion on that genre/time period, and 10 songs that will make you continue to generalize the genre/time period as low-quality music.
But this is non-trivial and prone to more bias, so we'll probably never see it happen. In the mean time we can continue to use this example of pop-statistics in journalism to remind ourselves to be wary of what we read.
There was a lot of crap in the charts, but I think the overall level of quality was higher. I think the reason for that higher quality was essentially negative - the routes to an audience were much narrower, so artists were practically required to get into the charts to sustain a professional career. A far broader range of artists were playing the major label game, because they didn't have many alternatives.
"Pop" is a much narrower term in 2018 than it was in 1978, because musicians don't need chart hits or radio airplay. Digital recording and distribution have created a much more fragmented music market, because artists can connect directly with audiences rather than relying on a very narrow funnel of publicity and distribution. Good music is somewhat more difficult to find today, but I think there's more of it and more definitions of "good".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops
(proxy required outside the UK):
It is not obvious that you had to be a trained musician to succeed. Many who succeeded were, but many who succeeded are not.
As to the topic of the post --
In music production, you can think of the 'stage' available to the listener as a box. Pitch goes up and down, stereo pan goes left to right, and volume goes front to back. When you're producing, you can't have two sounds in the same space without them merging together in the listener's ear. In the early days of stereo music production, producers generally tried to place the sounds as if you were standing in the room, watching the band perform, and were fairly conservative with giving everything space, so that sounds wouldn't clash. As people got more sophisticated with production (think Dark Side of the Moon), producers started experimenting more with the listeners since of space -- surrounding them and enveloping them with sound -- but still generally trying to capture the sound of physical musical instruments. Even when they used synths, they tended to try and make them sound like "real instruments".
Once digital music production started becoming more widespread and sophisticated, producers started abandoning the pretense that they were faithfully recording the live performance of instruments and focused purely on sound as sound, and the new tools allowed them to perfectly place all the sounds next to each other on 'the sound stage' and take up all the available space. Which, if you're filling up all the space 'up front', as it were, necessarily means that the song is going to sound louder, if that's what people want to do.
Now, there are plenty of genres of even dance music who play with dynamics more -- think Deep House, for example -- even there, they're going to make the bass as loud as they can, because they still want to make speakers boom for the dancers -- and they can push them as loud as they can be, very precisely because ableton or whatever makes it simple to do.
I with agree that its got more precise, typically when producing a kick for techno I make sure that the power is exactly around the point where the sub is going to be able to play it back with the most impact.
Also with tools like Neutron we can make sure there is no overlap between channels.
I am probably a similarly age to you, but I hardly ever listen to anything more than 5 years old apart from as a learning exercise or if there are people in the same room as me.
>Serrà acknowledged in an email that a bias due to the “test of time” effect is possible but argued that its influence should be small. For instance, he noted, the long-term patterns and trends that he and his colleagues identified also hold over relatively short—and relatively recent—time periods (say, 1997 to 2007), where the “test of time” effect should be minimal. “The same happens with close and not-so-recent time periods (e.g., 1960 and 1968), where both years could partly incorporate such an effect,” he wrote. “Since the trend is consistent in short time spans where you assume the ‘test of time’ bias is minimal and, furthermore, the trend is also consistent for longer time spans, we can assume it is a general trend and, thus, that the ‘test of time’ effect is really small.”
There would be orders of magnitude more music published today because the tools are so cheap and available.
What you can do today with $2,000 of equipment is better in every single metric than what you could do in 1990 with $20,000 of equipment. (I’m excluding the costs of studio space here for simplicity, as that can be highly genre dependent: on one hand the cost of concert halls for a symphony orchestra probably hasn’t changed much; on the other hand new electronic music doesn’t need a physical studio at all.)
I don’t know about the economics of recording back in 1960 but I can say with confidence that even the absolute best equipment found in the top studios would be technically inferior to today’s $2,000 electronics. (Though they did use their genius to innovate sounds which we still love to emulate today, so those old studios may well be creatively superior. But we have all that creativity in the form of plugins and effects today.)
While this might be true for recording media (e.g. a DAW with high end SnR vs 4-track tape overdubbed to death), we still use e.g. the same microphones as back then, and they're still expensive. Ditto for all kinds of analogue musical instruments (guitars, pianos, etc).
Also cheap electronics makes diy solutions more affordable. One could mike a drum set using cheapo low end Behringer dynamic mics paired with a self built preamp to get very good results for the money.
Good microphones were almost prohibitively expensive in the old days. Today you can buy something like an SM57 for €100, and that's normal retail price, no special offers or anything. Second-hand, they're usually less than half that.
Decent acoustic guitars can be had for less than €200, brand new. Sure that won't be a fancy name-brand guitar, but it'll sound good and play well.
All kinds of great outboard gear like the FMR Really Nice Compressor is €200, and it's one hell of a piece of gear, even at twice that price. Combine with an inexpensive mixer with decent preamps, and you're already well on your way. Yes, even Behringer is decent these days.
And you can run a pro-grade DAW like Reaper on an ordinary run-of-the-mill PC. An audio interface with a good amount of input channels is going to cost a bit, but if you're OK recording one or two tracks at a time, a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 is €120. And even inexpensive studio monitors have astoundingly good sound quality, compared to what people used to swear by.
You can get really far on a budget nowadays.
Quality guitars, amps and microphones are vastly cheaper, because of the astonishing improvements in automation and far-eastern manufacturing. A $400 Squier Vintage Vibe strat is 95% as good as an American Fender strat from 1990, at about 20% of the cost in real terms. Budget condenser microphones simply didn't exist before the mid-80s, so you'd need to spend about $2,000 for a decent LDC mic; today you can get a very good LDC from Rode, SE or Aston for about $300. The same goes for headphones, monitors, outboard and all sorts of other gear - it's just ludicrously cheap in historical terms. A grand piano is still an expensive item, but you can get a beautifully detailed and utterly convincing multisampled piano plugin for under $100.
By that measure, older music was much better. Sure, the chart has flashes in the pan and bubblegum garbage in every age, but the difference in memorability between the Top 40 now and the Top 40 even 15 years ago is quite staggering.
However, at no point did someone as annoying as Ed Sheeran dominate the charts...
For political, financial, practical, and historic reasons, the "live" tracks were supposed to be rerecorded specially for the show. So often you'll hear a unique version on TOTP.
After about the early 70s it was damn near impossible to record and mix a single in less than a day. So what actually happened is that the TOTP producer responsible for the rerecording would be taken out for a very generous drink and/or lunch while the "session" was happening, and then they'd return to find that a master tape had magically been created in their absence, and not at all brought in by the band's manager, having already been recorded and mixed earlier.
It was a weird sleight of management that kept everyone happy.
Then the bands would go on and throw themselves around with no instruments plugged in. The vocals were often live, but everything else was literally just for show.
Debbie Boone? The Beatles before Dylan told Lennon that his lyrics suck?
Anyway, the issue with Ed Sheeran is that he appeals to the Tweeny Girls who are the only group still spending money on music. And, as such, the powers that be are going to flog him senseless until he stops printing money.
The issue is less Ed Sheeran being annoying than the saturation marketing reaching comical levels.
Older music was just as bad/good as today.
That's trivial to fix, just take the actual at-the-time top-20 of each year. Yawn.
The switch away from melody is also extremely present in soundtracks. Think about John Williams who, in my opinion, is the "master of melody". Every time he creates a soundtrack there are instantly recognizable melodies and motifs. Just reading the following words - Harry Potter, Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, The Godfather - and you could probably hum any of those melodies on command. Or at least you could instantly identify it if you heard it. Contrast that with someone like Hans Zimmer (who is excellent, BTW). But he's a more "modern" composer, right? And if you look at his stuff you'll see that he's basically a "master of timbre", which is why someone like Hans Zimmer stands out in the modern era where, as the article states, timbral variety has gone down. In fact, I would argue that some of Zimmer's best work are the ones where he actually combines his timbral mastery with melody. Things like Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean.
That being said. I've heard lots of great modern music being produced you just have to look for it. Kinda like the way some of the best video games I've seen being made these days aren't giant AAA games with huge a Dev staff and budget, but small indie games with one or a few developers seem to be the real leaders in game innovation these days, a lot of the 'good' music being made isn't the stuff that comes on the radio or hits the top song lists of Spotify or whatever the kids use these days.
Loudness is kind of ridiculous these days though. But, I've noticed a big difference in songs I listen to that are intended to be released on vinyl(this still happens) vs songs that are intended for digital or CD release. The vinyl tracks are far less compressed, have moredynamic range, and are 'quieter', even for dance type tunes, than the digital ones, which have peaked red lots without any kind of amplification and their waveforms are basically just one big blob from start to finish. Compression and normalization have kinda wrecked the quality of a lot of music. One of Metallica's newer albums suffered from that badly, the song's weren't terrible but the mastering made them sound like shit. Then there's autotune...but that's a whole other pile of bullshit right there.
Famous for being so bad, Guitar Hero's development team asked for the original unmastered files, was granted their request, and then properly mastered them just so they could be included in the game without destroying the experience.
Guitar Hero's version of Death Magnetic was apparently pirated more times than rips of the authentic release. It was heavily praised for being a more clear, detailed mix, that didn't shove highs under the bus for muddy lows and generally ruined vocals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg for a comparison on the least ruined song on the album, that the author volume matched for the video. The original release had to be decreased 14dB to match the level of the GH3 release for this comparison.
The sounds other than vocal part of Dr Dre’s album probably wouldn’t really stand on their own and much is quite repetitive (as noted in the study).
Led Zeppelin Immigrant Song can definitely be enjoyed without the vocals, though the vocals really make it recognizable.
Similarly, there are quite a few rock songs that have been made into pretty interesting orchestra pieces.
Would be interesting to see if there any hip hop masterpieces that have been arranged for classical music.
Nas with National Symphony Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei_l3h4J-Ck Deltron 3030: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7FxVSDLonY
When a piece of music is both simple and captivating, I view that as a huge achievement. I can play simple songs, but no one wants to listen to them (and rightly so!). The Ramones can play even simpler songs, and they are special. I have no idea how to measure something like this.
We, by which I mean the Western world as influenced by pop music in the era of widespread mass communication, are settling on a common collective cultural music motif, and this cannot help but be a bit of a race to the complexity floor in order for it to be sufficiently widespread and stabilized.
A few of questions to consider:
- Are timbre, pitch, and volume the only good metrics to measure song quality in? What about lyrics? What about themes? What about instruments? etc.
- Are variations in these three metrics necessary or sufficient for there to be quality in music?
There may be an objective sense in which a song from thousands of years ago has better lyrics than one from today, but nobody can perceive it through the language barrier.
In the "good old days" you could at least count on a verse, chorus, different verse, chorus, etc. structure. Then at some point they were doing "chorus, chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus...". Soon we'll be lucky to get more than a repeated sentence fragment.
Case in point: https://www.google.ca/search?q=turn+down+for+what+lyrics
Or this gem: https://www.google.ca/search?q=watch+me+whip+lyrics
A better example of a pop song might be Twist and Shout; not much variety there either.
Latin church hymns, for example, largely use the same corpus of Latin for lyrics, but no one is about to accuse Mozart or Beethoven of a crisis of originality in lyrics.
Case in point: https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/3/32/Mozart_427_Great_Mass_...
That's not a good metric.
If I looked for a good metric, I would probably take min(word per meaning and touch), but that would raise a question on what ‘meaning and touch’ is. Nonetheless, good lyrics always seem to be un/under-spoken or sharp cut.
Music that combines real instruments and electronic instruments can produce a much wider variety of sounds than either type alone.
And electronic effects are hardly a new thing - they've been around since the mid 80s.
It only takes objective measures and observes that they've been following the same patterns (probability distributions) over the last 50 years, just with variations on the distributions' parameters. Furthermore, they observe that the parameter changes over time are always to lower-variance versions for these distributions.
Finally, they argue that you could take a generic pop song from 50 years ago, modify it according to the current changes in parameters (adjust the harmonic progressions to the currently fashionable ones, change the instrumentation, and increase the average loudness) and it should sound like a modern generic pop song.
More importantly, they make no claims whatsoever regarding the quality of individual songs. In fact, they never study nor reflect on individual songs.
The original article's TLDR is: Music from the last 50-60 years has been using the same basic principles, and variance in timbre, pitch and loudness is decreasing over time between the mass of pop songs.
Being somewhat of an old timer, I continue to be amazed by how the very idea of what constitutes a pop hit changes over time. As a kid, I could never have anticipated hip hop.
The difference between a perfect groove and crap rhythm programming is literally ms, and the difference between talent and mediocrity is often down to being able to feel those tiny timing offsets.
It's also a central feature of classical performances. Timing variations are controlled with extreme precision, and can make or break an interpretation.
One of most notable example of a non-unique song, Aretha Franklin's Respect, is actually a cover, and the parts which are original to that particular rendition are quite repetitive. If we were to take out covers and samples from the body of music, we wouldn't have very much left.
Blues and Jazz artists inherently understand this. It is essential in classical. However, modern pop music, which has become saturated with hip-hop/rap influence, is going the opposite direction, filling every possible space with noise. The loudness war is only one facet of this.
I pretty much disagree with any premise that music is getting worse, in general. Pop music, maybe, but the sheer quantity and variety of amazing work out there can't be understated. I've found so many life changing works of music that have been produced after 2000 and continue finding them all the time. Anyone saying music is getting worse either isn't looking in the right place, or is stuck in their ways.
I don't agree that pop music is becoming more vanilla and less offensive. In fact I think it's demonstrably quite the opposite -- much more vulgar and crude. Just a few moments spent with modern "music videos" should dispel any notion of bland, inoffensive art.
It did? Apparently there can't be only disagreement over the year.
I've started using eqMac2 [1] on my Macbook for equalising my headphones. The difference between non-eq sound and my profile is night and day. Without the equaliser it sounds like I'm listening to music through a swimming pool.
I have to say though, nothing beats music with proper dynamic range being pumped through a >$10,000 speaker system in a room that's been properly fitted for the acoustics. There's a new nightclub that's opened in my city, where the owner has spent a lot of time and money getting the sound system set up properly. He has an absolute banging Funktion One system [2], with properly designed room with all the correct dampening and stuff. The difference between that and a generic setup with no design is absolutely night and day. You can stand in the middle of the dance floor with the music absolutely cranking and still hold a conversation. As much as I do love techno, I really want to see them put some Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd through the system.
With proper sound systems like a Funktion One and high quality music, you don't just hear the music, you can feel the music. It's absolutely phenomenal.
http://www.jumble.blue/en/what-nobody-tells-you-and-admits-a...
I haven't listened to enough psy-trance on F1 systems to really make a comment, but it's something I'll definitely think about next time I'm at a psy-trance thing with F1 speakers.
The loudness wars (mass application of massive compression that reduces dynamic range) are the music equivalent of adding salt to savory foods. People like it better even though it's technically "worse".
BTW, came to post about the wars
Those are 2 different kinds of loud making your point sort of moot.. The former is about amplifying every frequency with the same amount (well, within limits of whatever harware you're using), the latter is about amplifying certain frequencies more than others resulting in relative differences between instruments getting smaller.
There's a clear difference between well-produced songs and over-compressed songs. The over-compressed ones tend to be much quieter, because the normalizer goes by average volume instead of peaks. So well-produced songs get to go "over" for some amount of the song, to give room for dynamics.
Ringo Starr was a mediocre drummer, yet many claim the Beatles are the best band ever (a stupid claim to make about any band, but here we are).
Most pop music will be bad, because art is hard. There are different ways to make art work. There are different ways to make music work. The more dogmatic you are about what makes art and music good, the more you'll miss out on great stuff, the more you'll limit yourself.
The combination of Future and Metro Boomin is just as exciting (to me) as the combination of Jagger and Richards or Lennon and McCartney.
Sure Impressions only has two chords... but Giant Steps, another Coltrane tune essentially has 5 chords every three bars and modulates in that time as well. They're very different charts by the same artist. And even with Impressions they really didn't play it safe nor did they play it straight dorian in the solos either (much less so than Miles did with the same two chords). Depending on which recording of Impressions you're referring to, I wouldn't call Eric Dolphy's bass clarinet on "India" a common timbral choice either and on the same album as Impressions.
The point was over a large body of work there is much more homogeneity today than there use to be. While we can bicker about their data and study approach, the gist of their conclusion is not necessary invalid or stupid. Maybe their methods are...
[edit for clarity] Before anyone thinking about it jumps on my case... yes I know Giant Steps is 16 bars with four bar phrases or "stanzas" if you prefer... but to my ears the fourth bar in each group, while structurally important overall, functions more as embellishment and transition harmonically, melodically, and (a bit less so) rhythmically setting up the next phrase... the first three bars in each group are really the focus and point. (sorry had to get that off my chest).