Is there too much music? | Hacker News Reader

Is there too much music?

telegraph.co.uk

22 pointsALee20 comments

Last October I awaited the arrival of my new university roommate. He arrived toting shoe boxes, piled high. They swayed side-to-side as he walked, and he shuffled cautiously to assure they didn't fall. He dumped them of his bed; I guessed they contained books. After he'd brought in his clothes he opened the small boxes: CDs, shiny plastic cases. I counted 560.

I wasn't a musical kid. I brought my first album at 16 - Dido - and had recently, at 18, started listening to Boards of Canada. Why anyone would need so many CDs puzzled me, but, I assure you, he did need them. Music played all day: Kraftwerk, The Human League, Sebastien Tellier, Air Lemon Jelly The Divine Comedy MorcheebaMassiveAttackdarfpunkkidloco...

I loved it. I found my musical niche - electronica - and started listening. The change from music novice to music whore was gradual, as my last.fm attests. But I'm now listening to music 10 hours a day, often falling asleep with it playing. Like a rollercoaster, there's the gradual grind up one side of a large drop, then the clicking stops, and everybody holds their breath, and you fall. Headfirst. You can't escape gravity.

I wish it hadn't happened. It's hard to think with music gushing into your ears, it's a constant nag on clear thought, so you turn it off. But that's worse. There's something missing. It's like the feeling having forgotten something, you pat yourself down, you look around, everything seems fine, but something's amiss.

It's playing with my head. Seriously.

Modern popular music is ear-candy, all calories and no nutrients. It requires little effort for the listener to enjoy. In exchange it provides constant small doses of pleasure, heavily optimized to be as addictive as possible. In that respect, it is much like the internet, TV, or smoking.

It is one of the many shiny, bright, loud, or tasty super-stimuli that we savanna apes must struggle with in the modern world.

Aren't you describing pop music in general? I don't see how what you said only applies to "modern" pop.

Aren't you describing pop music in general?

Yeah, to me "all calories and no nutrients" is pretty much the definition of pop music. Ear candy.

Sure. But I do think it is more heavily produced and optimized to be catchy than ever before. There is a quantitative, though not qualitative, difference.

All else being equal, requiring less effort is a good thing. Artists who optimize on that variable are better than those who don't. Sure, you can trade it for depth (which is why good art often takes effort) but it is backwards to therefore disparage work that is easier to understand.

Nabokov is a great writer who, unlike Joyce, was able to make his work relatively accessible. A first reading will be very rewarding. Nevertheless, repeated readings bring out more depth and continue to be rewarding. I think this is a skill to be admired.

Wow, I'm sitting here trying to study for finals and couldn't agree more. Ever since I started university, I've started listening to a ton of music, as you described, even fall asleep to it. Lately, I've been listening to more electronica in addition to my unhealthy addiction to 1980's music. When I try to do homework, I attempt to turn it off since the words in music are too distracting when doing physics or maths. Problem is, the silence is even worse...

I'm reading a book on the history of Opera (the genre, not the browser) and the author made an interesting observation.

Namely, it used to be the case not so many decades ago that you might only hear your favorite piece of music a dozen times in your lifetime.

I can't even fathom the emotions involved should that be the case, trying to take it all in and knowing it might be a very long time until you hear a particular piece again.

That has some interesting consequences on music quality. I find that pop music usually sounds good enough at first but upon repeated listens gets very tiresome. Whereas good music may sound rather uninteresting at first pass, but upon repeated listenings, one discovers the depth of the song.

Were music enthusiasts in the past more sophisticated listeners? Even more provocatively, has recording technology allowed us to create more sophisticated music? Has that indeed happened?

There's also the possibility that a lot of unremarkable music existed, but has been forgotten. We're much better at archiving things now, so it tends to accumulate.

Does it have to be sophisticated to be good? I don't think so. Some "unsophisticated" music quickly wears thin, others don't. Some of the most beautiful music is the simplest (think Ode to Joy, Brahm's Lullaby, and anything by Irving Berlin).

Case in point: Recording technology lets me, a child of the 80s, locate and listen to Ella Mae Morse, a somewhat unlikely white jazz/bluegrass/r&b singer from the 40s.

Is her Cow Cow Boogie sophisticated? No. But it makes me very, very happy. Even on repeated listenings (and singings). My life is better for it :)

Brian Eno (among others) has often written and spoken about the effect of recording technology on music.

Some of his observations: composers can play with tone, timbre, and perceived physical space in previously unavailable ways; composition becomes much like sculpture when you can "carve out" music from a multi-track master (think of dub music); music no longer need be aimed at an active audience (hence the rise of ambient music); music can be much more dense because you can replay it as often as you need to get all the details.

> it used to be the case not so many decades ago that you might only hear your favorite piece of music a dozen times in your lifetime.

That depends greatly on the category of the music. If you are talking about a symphony, then certainly. But if it was a song you and your friends all liked, then you might have sung it often.

Let's remember that music, particularly singing, used to be something that people did when they got together. That's what folk music originally was. See also "drinking songs", which were the music in bars before everyone got used to listening to top-notch musicians all the time, and collectively decided that ordinary people singing wasn't worth much.

But today "folk music" gets performed on a stage.

In the U.S., church meetings are pretty much the last remaining environment where large numbers of people regularly sing together, but it's fading even there.

Sad, I think. (And, yes, I realize I have wandered from your point.)

"Recent research has established some interesting facts about our relationship to music. The average American hears more than five hours of music per day, yet a new survey suggests that American teenagers actually consumed and shared 19 per cent less music in 2008 than they did a year ago. CD sales were down (28 per cent) but download sales also fell (13 per cent) and even illegal downloads declined (six per cent). More pertinently, borrowing and swapping music between friends was down 28 per cent. Thirty two per cent of teens expressed discontent with the music available for purchase, while 23 per cent said they already have a large enough collection of music. Is it possible we are reaching some kind of saturation point?"

My guess is that these things ebb and flow. The arrival of a new genre or subgenre can spark a lot of interest and passion, and sales (think grunge and alternative). A long period of stagnation can cause sales to decline (think mainstream rock in the late 90s - early 00s).

Of course, this is all anecdotal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.

I question the numbers regarding downloads as music available through online services takes a big chunk out of the download space, legal or otherwise.

Why download and manage the storage of music when sources like Pandora, last.fm, skreemr, seeqpod, etcetcetetc... will do it for you.

I haven't downloaded any music in years, as I can just get it online whenever I want it.

its hard to listen to streaming music on a mp3 player which has no internet connection

I actually think that this article is confusing two things, the fact that the technology has evolved to make music more accessible (even omnipresent), and the fact that there are a lot of people producing music at the moment. Whilst one may have facilitated the other, the effects the author describes in the article are due sometimes to one, sometimes to the other (e.g. the overwhelming amount of bands at SXSW is due to the large amount of music being produced at the moment, the fact that music is now everywhere -in shops, on the radio, on screens in public places, on YouTube or MySpace- is due to the technology facilitating music distribution.)

My problem is not so much with the fact that music is available everywhere as with the fact that most of it isn't very good - the commercial impetus behind most modern (pop) music means that there isn't a lot of variety (because record companies apply their own fitness functions, going for 'proven' formulas), and the emphasis on immediate commercial success puts more emphasis on tangential factors (production values, marketing etc) than on the music itself. So, I'm worried that although the availability of music has increased, its value to society (i.e. its cultural and intellectual benefits) may actually have diminished.

I doubt it and as always Sturgeon's Law needs to be applied here.

But if the whole pie increases, then perhaps even the 10% is significantly large, especially given costs to music creation have decreased so drastically.

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