It's Official: Modern Pop Music Too Loud and All Sounds the Same

PopHistorian

PopHistorian

The Living Force
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_http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/26/us-science-music-idUSBRE86P0R820120726

Typical kind of eye-catching, lightweight news piece but mildly interesting for music fans.

(
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."

[...]
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A few interesting points in the Comments section, too.
 
Henry Rollins once made an interesting comparison of music to food. You get "home made" music that can really nourish you in a sense, and then you get the nasty "processed" music that does nothing for you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2q5L8kUOtA

As time goes on and more and more music is made, it's going to get harder and harder to make something really original. In the 50's to the 90's people had great music on tap IMO, now with many record companies being bought up by the big 5 or 6 companies at the top of the chain -you have to really dig and search to get to the good stuff that's being made pretty much underground.

These said big companies are in it for the money and nothing else and if they can use the path of least resistance to push out cruddy processed music to do that then they will!
 
chezza said:
These said big companies are in it for the money and nothing else and if they can use the path of least resistance to push out cruddy processed music to do that then they will!
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techno.png

Seems relevant:)
 
I'm a musician, but whenever I say this to people who actually like this new pop crap, they say it's all about taste, and there's a saying in my country: Tastes cannot be debated. Finally I have something to use as leverage in my argument. I must say that my professional ear hurts when I hear these sounds they're making in the past 7 years. It's cacophonic, my god. The kick drum sounds like somebody is using a demolition ball on a steel-framed building. All the sounds are the same, all the vocals sound the same. I didn't need scientist to say this, but this is a welcome addition in my arsenal of arguments against these deaf people (cause you have to be deaf to like this music) P.S. love the comic. must share immediately
 
Back in the 1970's I use to joke around about all the rock bands making money by knowing only three chords.
 
Back in the fifties, virtually every pop song had the same one-six-two-five repeating chord sequence ("Earth Angel", "Jo Ann" "Blue Moon", and countless others) It was boring and simplistic, but tolerable. A lot of the stuff you hear today doesn't require an ear for music but a stomach for it.
 
Also 1-3-5 progressions, but I think the amount of chords has nothing to do with it. Funk music ussualy has only one chord, but it's way more complex than rock music or pop music.
 
Al Today said:
Back in the 1970's I use to joke around about all the rock bands making money by knowing only three chords.
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Al you are right!
I grew up in the 80's and whenever my friends wanted to go to dance in a "disco" or bar or however called it, it was a nightmare for me.
I just wanted to hide in a corner cover my ears and eyes(strobe lights!) or just get out of there!
I never understood why people go there in a first place!
The garbage what they playing I simply don't call it music, it's more like noise.

For me music is Mozart, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Verdi, Puccini, etc.
Of course for dancing if I would have a party I love Ray Charles and so many classic jazz I would play that!
:violin: :dance:
 
:D
The difference between rock music and jazz music:

Rock, a group playing three chords for an audience of thousands.
Jazz, a group playing a thousand chords for an audience of three.
 
Revolucionar said:
1-4-5 sorry :D
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Isn't this the most common chord progression - from classical music to blues? It seems it's "mathematically the strongest inherent pull," so to say, in terms of chord progressions. More specifically 1 - 4 - 5 (dominant {5 - 7th}) - 1. Then all sorts of variations can be (and usually are) done on that fundamental structure.

topdrawer said:
:D
The difference between rock music and jazz music:

Rock, a group playing three chords for an audience of thousands.
Jazz, a group playing a thousand chords for an audience of three.
Click to expand...

:lol:
 
One example of how pop music really is all the same these days:

Axis of Awesome: The Four Chord Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

The good thing about music is that everything that's been made is always available. So hopefully the crappy stuff will dig its own grave and people will go back to creativity at some point, marking this generation of money-first as a musical black hole.
 
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