Pop music too loud and all sounds the same: official (lyrics, sing a song)
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This shouldn't be need, but it's official. Pop music had became too loud. There's less instrumental emphasis.
Quote:
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 make it sound louder than others even at the same volume setting on an amplifier.The music industry has long been accused of ramping up the volume at which songs are recorded in a 'loudness war' but Serra says this is the first time it has been properly measured using a large database.
It's the rise of the monogenre. Mainstream pop, country, rock, and rap are all beginning to sound the same. Autotuned voices singing vanilla, ridiculous, hollow lyrics mentioning everyone's favorite brands to a computer manufactured beat. Why learn to actually sing or play the guitar when you can just mix some bullsh*t on the computer and sing a song that any 13 year old girl can relate to?
Perhaps they've just refined what sales to a popular audience. Maybe "loud songs with simple chord progression" are truly "catchier" and if those had been more common back when they would have dominated. (Early "rock and roll", I think, tended to be simpler/louder than Cool or Bebop-era jazz) However people either didn't have the information then or had some concern about simply doing what was most marketable.
I think there is more experimental stuff in alternative and indie. I bought a Tori Amos album recently that had an oboist listed plus had songs inspired by Satie and Bach. Not sure how I feel about it yet, but that's certainly an effort at more complexity or difference. I do wish more in pop would try for a greater variety in instrumentation. Might be nice to say have a pop song with trombones that's in quintuple meter. It could still be about typical pop-song stuff like love, lust, jealousy, or food.
It's the rise of the monogenre. Mainstream pop, country, rock, and rap are all beginning to sound the same. Autotuned voices singing vanilla, ridiculous, hollow lyrics mentioning everyone's favorite brands to a computer manufactured beat. Why learn to actually sing or play the guitar when you can just mix some bullsh*t on the computer and sing a song that any 13 year old girl can relate to?
it's mostly about image, Not talent today. Absolute noise. I agree. The same tripe played over and over, In every cafe, supermarket and car stereo. Completely soulless. There are a few good singers but only a few.
What has bothered me for years are the artists that are NOT well known and who are on independent labels that showcase excellent songwriting, musicianship and structure that have only small followings being in the background while groups like LMFAO, Maroon 5 (Whiny B.S.) And Coldplay shriek about insipid subjects while the more obscure ones can't break big because of the suits that market these plastic bands to the masses to rake in the green. How much talent that lies undiscovered is really out there?
If i hear "Call me Maybe" one more time i might wrap my head in barbed wire.
Perhaps I'm being cynical here, but it's much easier to control a 'entertainer' who can't play an instrument, can't really sing well, and is entirely dependent on the record company/personal mgmt team. A real singer or band who can write and play their own material may be too independent for the management to fleece while their hot.
I knew there was a reason why I largely gave up on newer music in the 1990's. This is probably it. It all sounds the same, and is all garbage. If they could put in a measurement for quality of song writing, it would probably even further justify that conclusion.
Perhaps I'm being cynical here, but it's much easier to control a 'entertainer' who can't play an instrument, can't really sing well, and is entirely dependent on the record company/personal mgmt team. A real singer or band who can write and play their own material may be too independent for the management to fleece while their hot.
I think in a way it's always been like this--though maybe with the rise of the American Idol superstars it's become even more prevalent. People might forget that prior to the 1960s--there was a time when pop music was dominated by singers performing the work of professional songwriters from the industry in New York with backing band of session players. Way back the idea of the musicians being both the singers and the songwriters in pop music was a more radical concept--which is why you had people being identified as singer/songwriter. With the rise of album-oriented rock it was assumed that rock bands would just play original material--though you've always had manufactured superstars. As a kid in the 1980s there were tons of them playing over the same synth beats and drum machine beats. I think with the ITunes generation used to listening to 10,000 different songs accesible on their phone--the age of albums is coming to a close and we're going back to a pop music environment dominated more by singles.
The one thing that bugs me about newer pop music is the processed auto-tune vocals. It really does have the result that it starts to sound the same as far as singers go. I like old school soul or jazz or blues or rock singers that sounded unique. They knew how to phrase things, even if it wasn't perfectly smooth. Now days everything has just been processed to death.
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