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.
Yeah - this could potentially be a huge bias. Songs that are top 40 hits for a month or so and songs that have staying power to be memorable 40 years from now are probably not quite the same category.
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.
That's true. Terrible songs (like Sylk-E Fyne's "Romeo and Juliet") are completely forgotten very soon while the really good songs are never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.
90s style and bad lyrics aside I think old hip hop etc like Romeo and Juliet you mentioned or a lot of Akon, dr. Dre stuff etc had a lot more melody and was much nicer to the ears than most of what we have today, even from good (subjective) artists.
People are really still doing this? I can't stand the fact that back in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.
It was done to make a point in a clever way. I think you should appreciate the level of skill it takes to RickRoll Hacker News and not get voted off immediately.
It's an interesting experience listening to '90s hits now that they are oldies. I certainly enjoy them a lot more now than then, and looking inside my soul I can guess at three reasons:
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.
This is a big one for me. When someone listens to recent pop on the car radio I want to rail against how cheesy and annoying it is. Then I'll be the one driving and flipping stations and I'll land on some 70s or 80s pop tune and happily sing along.
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??"
The BBC regularly repeats old episodes of Top of the Pops, a music chart programme that was broadcast between 1964 and 2006. It's quite close to a random sample of weekly Top 40 listings - about half the episodes in the archive are unsuitable for repeat broadcast, because they were presented by notorious sex offenders.
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".
maybe also because in the past you had to be a real musician to actually play something (no hardware to help you). So many were trained in making music (instead of self made) ? Not that being trained equals quality, but somehow, maybe it helps... (IANAMusician :) )
I think another reason is that pop music has been reduced to a formula to some extent, and that's exactly what TV shows like the X-factor are looking to capitalise on.
Almost everyone thinks the greatest music ever made was made in their late teens and early 20s, and it has always been that way. I think I'm somewhat unusual in that I spent a lot of time DJing in my 20s, so I developed habits around constantly searching out new music, but even so -- I'm in my early 40s now and I still reach back to dance music and rock music from the late 90s quite often to listen to. I've just resigned myself to the fact that late 90s trance music will make me happy in ways that no new music ever will.
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.
Producers often use reverb for front to back space as well.
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.
>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.
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.
I think it's fair to consider that our current view on classical music could be due to survivorship bias as well. Consider all of the composers who were lost to time because their peers or musical historians did not consider their music noteworthy.
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 think it's fair to consider that our current view on classical music could be due to survivorship bias as well. Consider all of the composers who were lost to time because their peers or musical historians did not consider their music noteworthy.
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 your comment highlights the biggest take-away from the article. Finding statistics to fit your narrative is a trope in journalism, XKCD has even pointed it out: https://xkcd.com/1845/
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.
I’m surprised it’s only two orders of magnitude. Compared to today, it was insanely expensive to record music professionally more than 20 years ago, especially when the recoding is more than a single microphone (or stereo pair) capturing a complete live performance in a single take.
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.)
>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.
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).
>Ditto for all kinds of analogue musical instruments (guitars, pianos, etc).
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.
>"we still use e.g. the same microphones as back then, and they're still expensive"
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.
True, but today's cheaper gear and instruments are much much better than back then, if even they existed. I keep reading nothing but positive comments about this brand (no affiliation whatsoever) http://kaminstruments.com/index.htm
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.
Further down in the Scientific American piece, one of the researchers does respond to this:
>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.”
True. I wonder if now, six years later, more older music, not just the biggest hits, has been digitized as well, so that the sample does not skew so heavily.
I found a much more interesting measure is simply to take the Billboard Top 40, wind it to an arbitrary date and see how many songs you know.
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.
So the BBC have been performing a variation of this by playing 30 year old "Top of the Pops" programmes on BBC4, and it's an interesting experience to see what has and hasn't stood the test of time. Most episodes have at least one spectacularly terrible "hit" on. Bonus points if the presenters intro them as the next new thing. Back then most of the performances were mimed to the track, with occasionally hilarious results.
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.
> However, at no point did someone as annoying as Ed Sheeran dominate the charts...
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.
Is it possible that today’s top 40 is at a disadvantage because the songs haven’t yet been as extensively recycled through advertising, movie soundtracks, re-releases and other mechanisms by which the top 40 of 15 years ago has become more embedded in our culture and hence more memorable?
Pop music doesn’t have any music in it anymore just sound fx. I speculate it has to do with lawsuits over the very few melodies available. First case I remember was the one with George Harrison.
What I have personally noticed over the last 15 years or so is the move away from melody and towards chord progressions and layering. This has the effect of producing more complex music (many times courtesy of modern digital technology) but nevertheless music that generally is forgettable. When I have my family in the car on the weekends and I'm forced to listen to the radio, I'm amazed at the lack of melody in most songs as well as the same progression, structure, and timbre between songs. They are so similar it's extremely difficult to recall which song is which if you take away the vocals. I think modern pop has attempted to replace instrumental melody with a sort of vocal melody that stands out for easy identification. This, I presume, is because of the nature of modern pop. Many "artists" are solo performers who have a brand to sell so the people writing songs for them make it such that the song is built to bolster the brand/image rather than attempting to structure the song in the best way musically.
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.
I see it as more of the same corporate 'streamlining' that's gone into other media. Much like movies and video games, pop music is being produced for a mass international audience. I've got friends in Indonesia and the Philippines that know more about modern American pop music, movies and video games than I do. Other than what comes on the radio at work I have no idea what's really popular these days.
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.
Music is global, but it's also infinitely more diverse than it's ever been. There are no record company gate keepers anymore. There are more artists and genres than anyone can keep up with. A ton of it is fantastic, but it's so hard to find among the garbage :)
Quickly read the article for evidence that popular music peaked with Motley Crue’s Theater Of Pain (1985) album but it appears that this article had also failed me.
Not to say that I think modern pop is anything special, but how do these three categories of measurements correlate? How do you compare something like Dr. Dre's 2001 to Led Zeppelin 3 with only these measurements? I would imagine that 2001 would rank lower on these metrics, but I don't think anyone would describe it as "worse".
The TV series Westworld had a scene where they had Shogun era musicians playing a Wu Tang Clan song on traditional Japanese instruments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__DEAK3AinM
Yeah, that sounds right. There are some producers that can stand on their own though too, but they would probably do well in the metrics in TFA.
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.
It's shocking how if you take a song from a genre that is focused heavily on vocals and take out the vocals, it's not a very interesting song anymore. I think rap -> poetry is a more common conversion than rap -> orchestral music because the latter is just crossing too big of a divide between music styles.
it's almost as if this is, on a highly sped up time frame, a process similar to that which yields stable traditions in different regionall forms of artistic representation, but without the kind of natural propagation boundaries that would normally contain the spread of a tradition to within a narrow geographical and cultural region.
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.
In my view, pop music goes way beyond the conventional idea of a "song" (melody plus lyrics). Rhythm is vital, especially if you consider the development of American music over the past 140 years or so. Relatively simplistic tunes were turned into instrumental hits by iconic recordings. "Hooks" and "drops" are important elements of pop hits.
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.
Rhythm and feel are massively underappreciated, especially in traditional music theory.
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.
Indeed, "music theory" is largely melodic and harmonic theory, and the study of the study of larger structures such as the sonata form. Rhythm is left up to the personal taste of the composer and performer.
Notice that the actual scientific article [1] doesn't make any considerations about quality.
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.
Is this a terrible thing? Why does content have to be original and unique to be good? Why can't content be similar, or even referential?
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.
From an entertainment perspective I might agree. However, music is a cultural expression (or should be). We should have stories to tell each other. Emotions more complicated than maudlin songs lamenting a lost love. Take away the content and music becomes a pretty screensaver. Interesting at first but non-engaging and without a message.
I do think pitch content is a useful metric. A lot of popular songs reuse a handful of common chord progressions. While the key and timbre may change from song to song, the tension and resolution of the chord changes, which can often be heard to have a certain feeling or emotional content in Western music, remains the same.
For me, it is the measure of a talented and mature musician is: one who knows how to leave space in a song, giving the melody room to breathe and the listener time to reflect and anticipate.
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.
Well lyrics and instruments certainly haven't gotten better. Drum machines and electronic effects have taken over for instruments and lyrics are about as shallow as they can be right now.
Well today's lyrics are worse in at least one objective way: number of unique words.
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.
Depends on what you define as "the good old days."
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.
Right. I occasionally hear local word-rich rap and it is low quality lyrics overall. In particular, it’s like they explain every line with ten more lines, as if their listener was an idiot who cannot read between these.
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.
Ok fine, objectively there's less lyric content and more repetition; and subjectively the lyrics aren't exactly getting more insightful or laconic to compensate.
Lyrics are guaranteed to improve over the very long term, as language change gradually renders old lyrics literally unintelligible.
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.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I have a feeling it's because the primary demographic of music listener is getting younger and younger. With streaming platforms like Spotify and Youtube, I imagine that teenagers and even young children have a huge sway over what the music industry produces and represent an increasing fraction of their revenue. Not to mention businesses are likely using music more than ever (it plays over the speakers on planes when boarding and de-planing, in stores, restaurants, gyms, etc.) and they all try really really hard to avoid something that is offensive, which usually means lowest common denominator, plain vanilla garbage. That being said, I really wonder about their database. They are certainly including more than just pop using that many pieces of music.
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.
You're not wrong. Adults have an ability to discern crap from talent. Children don't know the difference, and will buy what's pushed at them. This is very different from the 1940s, 1950s, where a record (and phonograph, speakers, amplifier) was expensive and music was primarily purchased by adults. The demographic shift is rather profound -- where the average age used to be in the high 30s/low 40s, to today, where it is teenagers.
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.
A well set equaliser (for your specific speakers/headphones) goes a long way towards reversing this problem. Or at least it feels like it to me.
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.
As much as I love a room with a properly fitted and tuned Funktion One system playing techno at a level where I can feel the bass in every part of my body, that pretty much is the sweet spot for F1 rigs, so you might be disappointed with how they sound playing other types of music.
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.
In my experience with smaller outdoor psy-trance parties they've tended to go with Opus rigs, but when I've been to the Ozora Festival in Hungary where they might have ten thousand people dancing in a valley, it's the sort of long-throw J-rigs the article talks about.
This conclusion may have held in 2012, but the loudness wars are ending with loudness normalization being enabled by default on most streaming platforms, which is what most music is mastered for these days.
Louder is not really worse when it comes to music. In fact, try turning up whatever you're listening to right now--it'll actually sound better!
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".
Compressed audio works better in environments with a lot of ambient noise such as cars. Since this is where most people listen to (and discover) the majority of their music artists are adjusting to their audience.
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.
Compressing means giving up on the dynamics. It's a lossy process. E.g. the drummer started a subtle crescendo, that lasted a few bars, and now it's gone because everything sounds the same.
Pop music isn't nearly as important now. As music is cheaper to make and produce, and more and more artists and fans live in niches and subcultures, the only people who listen to pop are the people who don't care enough to discern their more specific tastes. Why would it be any surprise then that pop trends towards a boring inoffensive middle?
I’d be interested to see a follow up on this. Spotify and Apple both encourage a form of mastering that doesn’t reward loudness. Apple has that soundcheck thing, Spotify as well (not sure what they call it). I’m sure this has had a not so insignificant effect on the loudness war.
I don't think Spotify has a specific word for it, just "Normalize volume", with an option to set it to quiet, normal or loud.
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.
It's always interesting to see certain types try to discuss art. Since James Brown, music has been trending toward an emphasis on rhythm, with melody and harmony playing a more pragmatic role - rather than the inverse. This article doesn't even mention rhythm.
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.
premise is fuckin stupid. you cant pick metrics willy nilly and use them to justify. impressions has two chords, still a brilliant song. lack of textural variety means a solo piano piece sucks i guess? no. you are just an opinion in search of evidence. sorry, try again.
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).
no you miss the point, which is that you cant arbitrarily choose metrics of quality and decide “more is better”. i played giant steps in 7 and added a bar of f# aug... guess im better than coltrane!
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.