Posted on 01/01/2014 7:18:16 PM PST by hecht
Last night we watched ABC's Dick Clarks New Years Eve Show. When they began to show music performers, the first I saw was Billy Joel. You could tell that it was one of his bona fide live performance as he sounded different from the studio versions, some minor errors etc. In my genervation ( I'm in my 50s) the best albums were often live , where the performers would jam, experiment and ad lib. The Allmans Live at Fillmore East is an example , or the Live version of Led Zepellin's "Dazed and Confused" -filmed in San Francisco - where Robert Plant ad libbed" going to San Francisco" in the middle of the song. After Joel the show went to a series of Millenial performers who all had auto-tuned lip synched performances, where they basically just aerobic danced to songs written by someone else, don't play instruments and have a few clones dancing in synch behind them. I joked to my guests" imagine if the Beatles were part of the Millenial generation. John Lennon would be lip synching an aerobic dance with George , Ringo and Paul would dance in unison behind him. What gives Millenials? have you no sense ? don't you realize that these "performers" are manufactured pretty boys/girls ? they are live action "Archies" If your taste in music is so vacuous , is there any hope for them? Is there any hope to wan them from Obama?
Even the non song writing performers of our generation i.e..e Elvis could at least perform.
Eh, music went downhill when the record companies switched from acoustic recordings to electric recordings in the mid-1920s.
Give me Isham Jones and Abe Lyman!
An analysis published in Scientific Reports by Joan Serrà of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona and his colleagues has found that music has indeed become both more homogeneous and louder over the decades.
Dr Serrà began with the basic premise that music, like language, can evolve over time, often pulled in different directions by opposing forces. Popular music especially has always prized a degree of conformity—witness the enduring popularity of cover songs and remixes—while at the same time being obsessed with the new. To untangle these factors, Dr Serrà’s team sifted through the Million Song Dataset, run jointly by Columbia University, in New York, and the Echo Nest, an American company, which contains beat-by-beat data on a million Western songs from a variety of popular genres. The researchers focussed on the primary musical qualities of pitch, timbre and loudness, which were available for nearly 0.5m songs released from 1955 to 2010.
They found that music today relies on the same chords as music from the 1950s. Nearly all melodies are composed of ten most popular chords. They follow a similar pattern to written texts, where the most common word occurs roughly twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third most common, and so on, a linguistic regularity known as Zipf’s law. What has changed is how the chords are spliced into melodies. In the 1950s many of the less common chords would chime close to one another in the melodic progression. More recently, they have tended to be separated by the more pedestrian chords, leading to a loss of some of the more unusual transitions. Timbre, lent by instrument types and recording techniques, similarly shows signs of narrowing, after peaking in the mid-60s, a phenomenon Dr Serrà attributes to experimentation with electric-guitar sounds by Jimi Hendrix and the like.
What music lost in variety, it has gained in volume. Songs today are on average 9 decibels louder than half a century ago, confirming what industry types have long suspected: that record labels engage in a “loudness race” in order to catch radio listeners’ attention. Since digital audio formats max out at a certain decibel level, as the average loudness inches towards that ceiling, songs will lose dynamic range, becoming ever more uniform.
This homogeneity is not just jarring to melomaniacs. It might confuse the popular algorithms for identifying and recommending tracks, like those used by Spotify and other music services. Many of these rely on timbre measurements to sort songs into genres, for instance. Some musicians are bound to respond by confounding expectations with new sounds. Whether audiences wish to be confounded remains moot.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/07/science-music
that and it’s mostly all being produced by the same few people/studios...
My mom worked for Logitech on Long Island. I always think of her when I see your name:)
The lack of dynamics is the result of the loudness war. The theory is louder is percieved as better so Compressors squash everything for max loudness. It’s mixed mastered and recompressed for radio.
Had free mouses and keyboards? Wow!
Steeeerrrike!
I like Perry Como and Merle Haggard. I also like Disturbed, Love Maiden and much harder stuff.
Get to chucklin’ ;)
PS, I’m a huge fan of Astaire and Hayworth as well.
A pal of mine, currently a mandolin player, but in the 70s a drummer for a proto-punk band, only listens to recordings from the 1920s no later.
"Rock n Roll's been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died."
Fabian was the very equivalent of today’s stars that you all disdain. And deservedly so. The point is that no-talent has a long history.
But that's part of the problem. The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. Elvis was on Ed Sullivan. Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, The Who -- all of these bands and so many more were on prime time TV shows -- 8 PM on network TV. I was 8 years old and I watched 'em and I thought they were pretty cool. My parents may not have liked them (they actually did) but the bands were sure easy to find.
Today? You get crap at Ryan Seacrest's Rockin' New Years Eve.
If you want better, you have to "know where to look".
I say that's a problem.
We had the same hardcore Tandy at the house til I left for college. No mouse option.
I Will Follow Him--Petula Clark (1963)
never heard of him before your posting, but no matter how bad he was there was no auto tune or lip synching then
You have selective memory.
To protect itself, your mind has tried to cordon off a great deal of the sixties, seventies, and eighties music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlRXQEA0yj0
Ring a bell?
Unfortunately I could post songs just as awful all night.
And do not get me started on seventies country.
Just thank God for the mercy he has shown you in allowing you to forget.
There is indeed great music made and you are right, finding it is the problem. The record companies, for all their faults, acted as a filter before profit completely overwhelmed every other consideration.
Today everyone has to be the modern equivilant of an old DJ rifling through crates at a used record store via you tube/Soundcloud searching or accept the poop that’s currently provided. Not a day goes by that this isn’t discussed on the music production boards.
Well, in truth, music from the 1920s is almost mind-bogglingly eclectic. And the difference between music styles and recordings from 1920 and 1929 is staggering.
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