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ITEM: A scientific paper from Barcelona’s Artificial Intelligence Research Institute says that modern recorded music is louder and more boring than ever – and proves it with math.
The loudness part is pretty easy to quantify. The researchers found an average 9% increase in decibel level over the past 50 years. That’s no surprise – it’s been noted before that CD mastering in the 21st tends to cram more volume, so CDs play louder.
However, more volume also means loss in dynamics – meaning it gets harder to hear the subtleties in instrumentation that make music interesting.
By no coincidence, the research team also discovered that the variety of timbres used over the last 50 years in music has dropped significantly across a wide variety of genres, after peaking in the 1960s, and now we’re using the same set of melodies we were in the 1950s to the point of sacrificing the variety of ways those melodies are combined.
How do they know this? Statistical analysis!
In other words, music is boring.
Which is great news for music snobs who have been saying this for years.
On the other hand, boredom is relative. For a start, new music isn’t boring to young people who haven’t had time to be all jaded and snobbish about music. And it’s not boring to people who don’t demand all that much from music in terms of chord arrangements, so long as the lyrics are catchy or meaningful. Rock and blues have been getting by on three chords since Day 1, and they still draw a crowd. In fact, purists (a.k.a. actual music snobs) complain when you try to vary the chord formula too much.
It’s also worth mentioning that with only so many chords to choose from, originality is harder to come by. Every new generation of songwriters has to deal with the fact that whatever they come up with, odds are someone’s thought of that. Which is why differentiation comes more from new instruments of technology, or maybe using traditional instruments in unexpected genres (accordians in rock music, for example, or maybe playing bluegrass versions of heavy metal songs).
Anyway, I don’t know about chord arrangements being an indicator of “boring” music. But point taken about the loss of timbres and dynamics. People used to listen to music a lot more closely than they do now. That’s arguably because there’s not as much to listen to now.
Being boring,
This is dF
The loudness part is pretty easy to quantify. The researchers found an average 9% increase in decibel level over the past 50 years. That’s no surprise – it’s been noted before that CD mastering in the 21st tends to cram more volume, so CDs play louder.
However, more volume also means loss in dynamics – meaning it gets harder to hear the subtleties in instrumentation that make music interesting.
By no coincidence, the research team also discovered that the variety of timbres used over the last 50 years in music has dropped significantly across a wide variety of genres, after peaking in the 1960s, and now we’re using the same set of melodies we were in the 1950s to the point of sacrificing the variety of ways those melodies are combined.
How do they know this? Statistical analysis!
The research uses Columbia University’s Million Song Dataset, which contains beat-by-beat data on one million different Western songs. They then do basically the opposite of sonification — different musical facets (melodies, instrumentation, etc.) become data points and, then, can be subject to regular old statistical anaysis models, like Zipf’s law, which describes a frequency relationship in which one musical chord’s frequency is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table of different chords. (Zipf’s law is usually used for linguistic analysis but works pretty well for music too, it turns out.) That is, the most popular chord is twice as common as the second most popular and three times as common as the third, and so on.
What they found was that chord distribution is getting less creative – instead of mixing common chords with uncommon chords, songwriters tend to use the same common chords over and over again, resulting in “a growing homogenization of the global timbral palette” and “a progressive tendency to follow more fashionable, mainstream sonorities.”
What they found was that chord distribution is getting less creative – instead of mixing common chords with uncommon chords, songwriters tend to use the same common chords over and over again, resulting in “a growing homogenization of the global timbral palette” and “a progressive tendency to follow more fashionable, mainstream sonorities.”
In other words, music is boring.
Which is great news for music snobs who have been saying this for years.
On the other hand, boredom is relative. For a start, new music isn’t boring to young people who haven’t had time to be all jaded and snobbish about music. And it’s not boring to people who don’t demand all that much from music in terms of chord arrangements, so long as the lyrics are catchy or meaningful. Rock and blues have been getting by on three chords since Day 1, and they still draw a crowd. In fact, purists (a.k.a. actual music snobs) complain when you try to vary the chord formula too much.
It’s also worth mentioning that with only so many chords to choose from, originality is harder to come by. Every new generation of songwriters has to deal with the fact that whatever they come up with, odds are someone’s thought of that. Which is why differentiation comes more from new instruments of technology, or maybe using traditional instruments in unexpected genres (accordians in rock music, for example, or maybe playing bluegrass versions of heavy metal songs).
Anyway, I don’t know about chord arrangements being an indicator of “boring” music. But point taken about the loss of timbres and dynamics. People used to listen to music a lot more closely than they do now. That’s arguably because there’s not as much to listen to now.
Being boring,
This is dF
