A bit off-topic, but it makes me think of how words and their setting has changed over history. In English music at least, words and how they were set was a big deal during the various switches between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th Century.
Catholicism allowed for polyphonic music, where the words (in latin) were layered to produce very beautiful music. An extreme example is Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium that has 8 choirs of 5 parts each:
However Protestantism required the words to be in English and sung without polyphony - so that they could be understood by all. For example another work of Tallis's:
How crazy is this thought, my lady:
although you are craving for my death,
if you do not help me by looking at me
with that scornful countenance that gives me life,
and which I miss so much:
then, since who has no life cannot die
and he who has life must die,
then—if you give me life, you'll have my death,
and I, through death, will gain my life.
Specifically English Protestantism, in this case. Some things were allowed to be polyphonic, such as Psalm settings, and Byrd made a point of setting Psalms that alluded to the struggles faced by Catholics at that time. Some referenced the desecration of Jerusalem, others were the known last words of martyrs.
Sicut Cervus (a setting of Psalm 42) is such an example.
It's not just the lyrics. There's a certain female voice that dominates the pop music industry. Repetitive doesn't come close. Clone would be more accurate. Pop music today is dominated by the X-Factor industry. In the 70s you had the influence of the music business moguls but there was still room for genuinely creative bands to appear on Top Of The Pops and in the UK Top 20.
Sia Furler. She works on songs for other artists and also does 'demo performances' to help singers develop a song. She's written songs for Rhianna, Adele, Carly Rae Jepson, Katy Perry, etc.
Martin has written or co-written 22 Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits, most of which he has also produced or co-produced, including Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" (2008), Maroon 5's "One More Night" (2012), Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" (2014), and The Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face" (2015). Martin is the songwriter with the third-most number-one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon (26).[4] In addition, he has had the second most Hot 100 number-one singles as a producer (20), behind George Martin, who had achieved 23 by the time of his death.[4]
I've been noticing that as channels get more custom tailored what is available to the mass market, where tastes are less refined, has been steadily receding in quality. Outcast to Drake; MacGyver to Ice Road Truckers.
But the opposite has happened on the other end of the spectrum. Emancipator or Bonobo (or Romare or Pilotpriest or or Nicola Cruz or Nu or Pantha du Prince or Sampha) are just leagues better than what we had even ten years ago. Sure the mass market is drinking down Fast and the Furious 9 or Transformers 11 or Spiderman ∞, but the quality of the films that are targeted at the intelligentsia is head and shoulders above what we used to have. Even television has stratified.
I think the internet has something to do with it. People follow people that are smarter than them because they learn from them or they interact with smarter people more because they tend to get upvoted more, but there is a window of potential interaction. None of my family members are on HN and very few of them follow me on Twitter (out of the 130+ of them). Then you move the smart people to the smart cities and the normal, day-to-day interaction that would have happened no longer does.
That's rather questionable assertion. Many people would not consider anything that's made by a "DJ" to be music, let alone high-brow one.
It also might be that you have only now discovered that there is something better than beyonces and x-men movies. That doesn't mean that there weren't anything good before, just that you haven't seen it.
But the thing is that I've looked and can't find anything nearly as good. Some artists brush up against it here and there (Glitch Mob, edIT, even Daft Punk, Weezy, or Kanye) but the density of really good work is no where near what it is today.
Speaking of Kanye, I actually think his last album was his best and that if he hadn't launched it with the following he built up when his work wasn't as developed (pre-Twisted Fantasy) his work would have a quarter of the following or less than it does today. He's one of the rare artists that keeps innovating after hitting it.
The only place I see at least some measure of really quality work in the past compared to today is fiction: Tom Robbins, Greg Egan, PKD, and many, many others. There are some contemporaries I like better (Ted Chiang) but I don't pretend it's not a matter of personal taste. But TV or music or even most film that's pre-2005 is almost unconsumable it's so flat compared to what the 1%-ile is today.
The internet has democratised music production and allowed us to have so much quality, self-published music that you'd never get in the past.
Technology has made music production so much easier and higher quality than before. I don't know much about non-electronic music, but I reckon for under a grand you could set up a half decent recording studio in your garage, and it's so much easier with computers to mix and master tracks than it was in previous decades.
I can find amazing techno tracks on Soundcloud and Beatport that are produced by some guy in his bedroom in Berlin that only a few hundred people in the world have also found.
Just the other day I found a track on Soundcloud that was produced in Melbourne back in 1997 that only ever had a single release of a few hundred CDs. I managed to track down the producer on Facebook and get a high quality .wav download of it. There's no way that kind of obscure stuff would've found its way to me pre-internet.
If you like that kind of music. There's absolutely no way in hell you will ever convince me that Kanye, or Daft Punk, have any, even most remote, relation to music, or art in general. Never heard the other ones, so I am not going to comment. And in the contemporary genres that I care about (adding contemporary, because really, Bach is better anyway, but I don't necessarily want to listen to classical all the time) it has been all downhill since the 70's.
All a matter of taste. There might have been a proliferation of genres, especially if you start enumerating all the (absolutely identical-sounding unless you are a trained maniac) varieties of Scandinavian Death Metal or electronic music, so it might be easier to come by something you like today, but it's not any better than what survived from 300 years ago, I would hazard a guess that very little, if any, of kanyes and deadmou5-es will survive even 10 years, let alone 300.
Many people wouldn't consider electronic music to be music or high brow. Many people are close minded.
Even within the electronic music scene, there's people that will dismiss genres as being not "real" music. A lot of people shit all over tech house for instance.
Not that anything needs to be high brow, but I do find GP's comment that there's more high quality music now than ever before to be rather closed-minded to begin with.
There may be more music (classifying, for a moment, anything that has that label as actually being music) made today, both due to the population increase and to it being easier and cheaper than ever to produce something and throw it to the masses, in case it sticks. But there's probably a lower proportion of quality music being made, for the same reason -- it's just to easy to make and disseminate stupid derivative junk.
Didn't find it for this specific one (except for everything that's explained in the article and available as JS from the website of course...), but they have a youtube channel with some live-coding sessions and a recording of one project from start to finish [1].
But still centuries behind liturgical music. Sing "Kyrie eleison" in this manner for 5 minutes, and then sing "Kyrie eleison" in a different manner for 10 minutes. Sing "Christe eleison" in between for a few minutes. Let's end the day singing "Osanna in excelsis" in a couple of different ways, for a few minutes each.
Actually not. Zipping itself produces some headers and metadata. Zipping can actually increase filesize. But the effect decreases the bigger the file you're zipping is.
Actually they’ll be fragments that sound like bursts of static but are actually adversarial constructions that induce an unquenchable thirst for the great taste of Diet Pepsi(tm).
Awesome post and presentation! I’m very curious if that raw song lyric data is available somewhere, would be fun to analyze it more. Here’s a small project I made that similarly lets you visualize song repetition: http://songbranch.gorch.com/
Is there some sort of data visualization framework they're using? The article is indeed beautiful, it seems like a huge amount of work for a single page.
The visualization of the compression algorithm in particular seems very bespoke.
Source inspection is hard as it's all been bundled, but you can see some of the json data in there, and some custom functions to do the plot interactions. The plot code is almost certainly D3 (based on some of the non-obfuscated calls).
This is a cool analysis featuring an interesting metric (degree of compressibility) for measuring repetitiveness in song lyrics.
Great graphics explaining the algorithm too!
I'm all for cool websites but by the time i scroll low enough for the data to show on the graph, the graph is off the page. then i scroll back up and it removes the data from the graph!
What are you even arguing here? The same eight notes/words for five minutes is just as boring as the same eight percussion soundings for five minutes. I don't know what a music fascist is, but I'm sure they get bored with 8 bar loops too.
Catholicism allowed for polyphonic music, where the words (in latin) were layered to produce very beautiful music. An extreme example is Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium that has 8 choirs of 5 parts each:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT-ZAAi4UQQ
However Protestantism required the words to be in English and sung without polyphony - so that they could be understood by all. For example another work of Tallis's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4fHU0Nales
Byrd in particular wrote a lot of works in the Catholic idiom that he had to hide, for writing such music could have got him killed.
https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/music/william-b...