POZ Community Forums
Off Topic Forums => Off Topic Forum => Topic started by: GSOgymrat on July 27, 2012, 01:10:00 am
-
Think popular music is crap? Think every song sounds the same? Some scientists agree with you! There is evidence that pop music is becoming more homogenized, less complex and louder.
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 .
-
reading thru the full comments was very enlightening; however I think this quote sums up the problem, when you leave out all the techno stuff:
pyronius wrote:
mind you, this only applies to pop music which says more about society’s decreased willingness to take a risk and pay for something new than it does about the amount of exploration being done by the people who aren’t making millions clutching their pants for lack of a belt or repeatedly declaring “baby baby baby baby baby baby baby!” into a mic.
the blandness of pop music in the search for the almighty dollar is probably the largest contributor to the problem of music sucking these days. ;D
-
I think American Idol has probably skewed the results by pushing Karaoke to top the charts.
-
And that's why I listen to intrumental music.
No lyrics - no babies.
-
Pop is initially for the young, or young at heart in that time period. It speaks to allot of individuals but as they get older, and pop changes with the times or money crowd, people tend to have different taste. Also, Pop (as in popular music) in the 50's and 60's isn't the same as it is now of course, but the sentiment is the same. However Rock-n-Roll was a nice evolutionary step for people who wanted great change and had a taste for attacking the system.