Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

[Forgetting2]

82_28, I found that thread you mentioned this topic in before.

[barracuda]

Pop music too loud and all sounds the same: official

Comforting news for anyone over the age of 35, scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.
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.

The study, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, offers a handy recipe for musicians in a creative drought.

Old tunes re-recorded with increased loudness, simpler chord progressions and different instruments could sound new and fashionable. The Rolling Stones in their 50th anniversary year should take note.

[Allegro]

^^^
I’ve found the paper, Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music, that was the source for the article, quoted above. Here’s the paper in pdf from Scientific Reports at nature dot com.

Thanks, b.

[Gnomad]

Thank god I don't listen to "modern pop music".
I do, however, listen to minimal techno, ambient, modern drum and bass, and countless things that deny categorization. There is plenty of dynamic range used over there, and thousands of people who compose, play, and mix, remix music that they love, and whom I can talk to.

(I do know the kind of stuff they talk about, though, and it hurts my ears and brain. Compressors were never made to be used by evil men like you. Just to mention an example, London Electricity, I could never bear listening to even one piece from you. Go and be ashamed in the corner with the asshat on yer heads.)

Good thing it is music that isn't mainstream enough for RIAA or any such national organization to give a flying fuck about (not that the artists and people would give them the benefit to do so either, most don't want anything to do with the copyright police), and I can freely download gigabytes worth of great mixes any given day (kind of legally too), and discover more original music for free whenever I feel like it. And I can give a comment on Soundcloud on their new track and how it sounded to me. I might even meet them at a local party, dance with them and share a smile or a tear.

Pop music, I could not give a shit.

Now playing:
http://mnmlssg.blogspot.fi/2010/10/ssg- ... rm-up.html
From 0 dB to plenty.

[vince]

Pop music too loud and all sounds the same: official

I KNEW it! THat would make a pretty good bumper sticker.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Pop music too loud and all sounds the same: official

I KNEW it! THat would make a pretty good bumper sticker.

Yeah. Too right.

Really modern pop music is (mostly) shit. It probably always was but its even more so now cos everyone under 25 missed the 80s the first round and somehow think they were cool when they happened, instead of horrible, trite and sanitised.

[Allegro]

Scientific PROOF That Pop Music Sucks!

< The host of the show refers to the paper, Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music, that was noted here.

It’s become the music producers’ world; not the artists’, they say. For example, a producer might orchestrate for one singer, but that producer’s style can be heard in orchestrations for other singers, too. That’s not at all uncommon. More consumers, though, are listening and ranting about the sameness of today’s pop music.

I’ve just reread this thread, and many thanks for the comments!

[82_28]

Good article, I constantly feel time-warped.

I'll channel graze into music programs, documentaries, or video and have to wait for clues as to whether they're from the 80's, somewhere in between, or present day.

Watched a bit of Apocalypse Now and it was weird seeing Martin Sheen, Harrison Ford and Laurence Fishburne as young men, because that film still looks, sounds and feels recent, and it's 34 years old.

It's like a long, braking cultural skid that started in the 80's. And by braking, I think something has chosen it, is engineering against progress and efforts to change course.

Speaking of time stopping/warped. I just re-read this whole thread and am about to move onto the others linked to throughout. Norton's comment on page one really resounded with me as I just yesterday was talking about Apocalypse Now and other Kubrick films with a man twice my age and we both got to thinking about it. There is no Kubrick film that seems dated in the least. We ran the gamut of the films we've seen -- we both think we've seen them all. Yet datedness is something that Kubrick was a genius in avoiding. Perhaps because he made so many films that were essentially brutally honest period pieces whether they were set in the future, past, present or even alternate reality.

[beeline]

Not that it changes anything about Kubrick's lack-of-datedness (I agree), but Apocolypse Now was directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

On edit: Kubrick directed Full Metal Jacket though.

[wintler2]

So, theres increasing concentration of power in the hands of music producers, who are after all just the local factory managers for the real owners of the capital. They want reliably saleable product and so real creativity goes out the window, too hit & miss sales-wise, too hard to commodify & sell across diff. markets.

Same thing with movies & fashion - increasing concentration of production in ever fewer hands and preeminence of the profit motive results in increasingly formulaic and shoddy product.

'Socially observable time' has stopped because real innovation and evolution, within the corporate behemoths who make most stuff, has stopped. No drama, globalised production chains and "natures bounty" are going byebyes, our kids will have complete creative freedom to decide what sort of shoes to make out of the cat.

[Luther Blissett]

The new Swans album is really weird.

[82_28]

Oh, god. You're right. What would we do without the Internet? Meaning you being here and setting me straight! I knew it was Coppola.

For some reason me fucking that up reminded me of Ministry's A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. From 1989! Jesus I am getting old (in my own right)!

[82_28]

Oh shit. Maybe because of this!

[Col. Quisp]

Styles are no longer changing because our puppet masters have grown bored with us. They unleashed all the technological advances that keep on advancing on their own. We're now just an afterthought. Soon to be wiped out. Very soon. The simulation has run its course.

[JackRiddler]

I can tell you a coming fashion trend that is pretty much unprecedented in the last century, and I like it.

It's called I'm fat and I like me fine (and you're not a better person if you're not and you're a worse person if you air your problem with me and fuck you if you do).