Interesting Study on Musical Evolution

[Anderton]

There have been a lot of studies about musical changes over the past few decades, but Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023 | Scientific Reports is more thought-provoking than most. It doesn't make value judgements, but instead ties changes to specific dates, and explores why those dates seem significant. 

 

One of the interesting nuggets to me is the thought that perhaps melodies getting simpler isn't an example of "dumbing down," but rather a need to complement new options in timbre and musical density: 

 

...musical complexity in popular music may be shifting away from melody altogether, instead manifesting in other aspects of the music. In particular, it is possible that timbre is increasingly carrying the complexity of today's popular music due to the expanding availability of digital instruments. In the 50s, the range of possible timbres for music production was limited to whatever sounds one could make with the physical instruments and accessories available at the time. Today, with the accessibility of digital music production software and libraries of millions of samples and loops, anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can create any sound they can imagine. Meanwhile, pop melody remains mostly restricted to the Western 12-tone scale, at least for now. Perhaps the much roomier space of timbral possibilities is now better suited as an outlet for creativity and expression than melody, causing the focus of composition to gradually shift away from the creation of interesting melodies and towards the creation of interesting timbres. Mauch et al.'s study partially corroborates this hypothesis; they found that musical diversity in terms of timbre and harmony reached a minimum in the 80s and peaked in the early 2000s.

 

I hadn't really thought of it that. The study itself is kind of dense reading but it has a lot of interesting thoughts. It's not interested in trying to prove "music isn't as good as it used to be," but is more about the possibility of changing, and evolving, priorities in musical expression. 

[ProfD]

interesting study.  A whole lot of words too.🤣

 

IMO, timbre and rhythm and influences from other styles of music has resulted in less melody.

 

I'm old enough to remember when songs had a bridge and vamp and other elements too. 

 

Then, there was "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" which was 17 minutes of....something.🤣😎

[AROIOS]

1 hour ago, Anderton said:

...musical complexity in popular music may be shifting away from melody altogether, instead manifesting in other aspects of the music. In particular, it is possible that timbre is increasingly carrying the complexity of today's popular music due to the expanding availability of digital instruments...

 

Geoff Grace and I had similar observations in an earlier thread. I don't think complexity is an "either-or" competition among elements of music as the article suggests though. There were plenty of Sophisti-Pop and AOR tunes from 80's and 90's that are rich not only in "melody" but also "rhythm", "harmony" and "timbre".

Sound design/mixing at the cost of musical complexity seems more like a lame excuse for the new producers' lack of music education and poor tastes.

[KenElevenShadows]

 

7 hours ago, AROIOS said:

Sound design/mixing at the cost of musical complexity seems more like a lame excuse for the new producers' lack of music education and poor tastes.

 

I have twelve years of classical training, am a recording engineer, and record weird, melodically simple ambient music. But please continue about my lack of music education and poor taste.  

 

 

 

[Mr -G-]

Let's not forget that the study is about music in the charts... There is a major financial interest in trying to make such 'music' memorable and fit the allocated times that broadcasters allow.

[Anderton]

17 hours ago, AROIOS said:

Sound design/mixing at the cost of musical complexity seems more like a lame excuse for the new producers' lack of music education and poor tastes.

 

But think about if it was the other way around, and the primary emphasis for centuries had been timbre and sound. Then people started getting more into scales and melodies. "Taking refuge in a moronically limited palette of 12 tones seems like a huge step backwards just because someone can't create sweeping sonic paintings with sound and timbre." Or consider classical Indian music, which doesn't have harmony as we know it yet has tremendously complex cultural rules.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, I'm somewhere in the middle. In my Unconstrained album, I pretty much jettisoned conventional song structures. The lyrics, sound, and production all contributed to the structure. For example, the emotions conveyed by the guitar in "If Only," and the repetitive echoes on the voice, create more of a mood than I could have with more developed lyrics and a conventionally structured song.

 

As Aldous Huxley said, "After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music." It's a pretty flexible form of expression.

 

17 hours ago, AROIOS said:

I don't think complexity is an "either-or" competition among elements of music as the article suggests though. 

 

Among musicians, I agree. But the average listener often has a hard time differentiating among instruments, and music is kind of a wash of sound. In that case, I think it makes sense that the brain can concentrate on only a limited set of musical parameters at a time.

 

Try this exercise: think of music in your head. For some people, it's a serial interface that can't image the totality of the song, but instead, processes a rapid succession of parts of the song. For example, when you hear the vocal for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in your head, do you also hear the guitars, bass, drums, etc. at the same time? For whatever reason, I can't. The instruments pop up in the spaces between words. I'm not sure what that signifies.

[ProfD]

18 hours ago, AROIOS said:

Sound design/mixing at the cost of musical complexity seems more like a lame excuse for the new producers' lack of music education and poor tastes.

Not really.  McDonald's isn't popular because it's the most nutritious food.  It's relatively cheap and simple. Same applies to music.

 

The *average* listener isn't interested in melodic or harmonic sophistication as evidenced by what sells in Popular music. 

 

Musicians tend to obsess over complexity in music. Yet, studies have shown that musicians aren't the strongest consumers of popular music.🤣😎

[AROIOS]

13 hours ago, KenElevenShadows said:

...I have twelve years of classical training, am a recording engineer, and record weird, melodically simple ambient music. But please continue about my lack of music education and poor taste.

You're fine brother. For Ambient, we can get away with even a one finger droning pad, the "at the cost of" qualifier doesn't apply here.

[AROIOS]

3 hours ago, Anderton said:

... But the average listener often has a hard time differentiating among instruments, and music is kind of a wash of sound....

...For example, when you hear the vocal for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in your head, do you also hear the guitars, bass, drums, etc. at the same time? For whatever reason, I can't. The instruments pop up in the spaces between words. I'm not sure what that signifies...

"Average listener" is a vague and controversial concept. The precise definition of that aside, it's both ironic and pathetic that too many musicians who dedicate years to learning and practice, end up voluntarily or forced by record labels to pander to clueless and tasteless "average listeners".

I think that over-pandering is one of the root causes of decline in musical complexity mentioned in the article. And popular music is one of the most twisted professions where the professionals constantly give in to amateurs' demand and opinions. Can you imagine a heart surgeon letting the patient decide how he should be cut open?
 

The "do we hear all the instruments at the same time" question is interesting. I think the experience you described is actually about a closely related but different question: "can we focus on all the instruments at the same time". For the former question, if we mute and unmute a non-trivial track(s) in a mix, pretty much anyone will notice the change, indicating that even when we didn't or couldn't "focus on" or "notice" the part(s), we do "hear" them.

[AROIOS]

3 hours ago, ProfD said:

...The *average* listener isn't interested in melodic or harmonic sophistication as evidenced by what sells in Popular music...

And even that simple observation often triggers the more politically correct among us. Not to mention the sad reality that professional musicians so often have to pander to the "average" in this twisted industry.

[Anderton]

Professionals don't have to pander to anyone, actually...unless they're in the music business. In business, you give the people what they want. I've written some books I'm extremely proud of, and it's interesting reading the user reviews. I'll get 5 stars and "indispensable book, highly recommended" comments, and 1 star reviews with "over my head, way too complicated."
 

What that taught me is no matter what I write, it has to be simplified. Those who find it difficult will find it easier to read, and those who like it will like it anyway if it's easier to read. These days, I put all my writing through the Fleish-Kincaid reading ease and grade level tests. Among other things, I try very hard to have no more than 14 words in a sentence, and hit no higher than an 8th grade reading level. I won't use a word like "denoument" if "end" works equally well. I use lots of bullet points and keep paragraphs short. It's a business, so it's not their job to meet me on my level. It's my job to meet them on their level.

 

I could be upset that I have to write this way, but the reality is I want to sell books. And at this point, it's also kind of a challenge to see how understandable I can make complex technical subjects.

 

Circling back to music, you'll always be able to find an audience for good music. The main variable will be the size of the audience, and whether that audience size is acceptable to you.

 

Of course another issue is why there isn't more emphasis on education in the arts, but that's a whole other topic. I've met many teachers who are dedicated as hell to teaching art, but get virtually no resources to do it. 

 

 

[ProfD]

58 minutes ago, AROIOS said:

Not to mention the sad reality that professional musicians so often have to pander to the "average" in this twisted industry.

Unfortunately.  It's either pander in order to get paid and/or take side gigs i.e. academia, books, workshops, lessons, etc.😎

[AROIOS]

On 8/29/2024 at 1:42 PM, Anderton said:

Professionals don't have to pander to anyone, actually...unless they're in the music business...

Exactly why music is great as a hobby but terrible as a job.
 

On 8/29/2024 at 1:42 PM, Anderton said:

...These days, I put all my writing through the Fleish-Kincaid reading ease and grade level tests...

Thank you for doing that. Natural language is rife with pomp, if the same message can be conveyed with 1st grade style of writing, I'm all for it.

Music, although also susceptible to pretentiousness and lack of empathy, is slightly different. There's simply no way an empathetic or pandering musician could rewrite a Debussy/Ravel piece with the notorious 6 (if not 4) bubblegum triad "Pop" chords.
 

On 8/29/2024 at 1:42 PM, Anderton said:

...you'll always be able to find an audience for good music. The main variable will be the size of the audience, and whether that audience size is acceptable to you....

Yup, Chris Anderson foresaw the Long-Tail/Patreon model with which many independent musicians support themselves these days. And I couldn't be happier for them and their fans.

[AROIOS]

On 8/29/2024 at 1:44 PM, ProfD said:

Unfortunately.  It's either pander in order to get paid and/or take side gigs i.e. academia, books, workshops, lessons, etc.😎

Thanks to Youtube/Patreon, there could be a new stream of income for them, although the "pandering" aspect is always present as long as it's a business, just a matter of "to whom" and "for how much".

[ProfD]

40 minutes ago, AROIOS said:

Thanks to Youtube/Patreon, there could be a new stream of income...

Right.

 

Surely, when considering career opportunities a few decades ago, parents didn't tell their budding musicians, ond day you'll grow up to be an influencer.🤣😎

[Anderton]

I learned classical sitar from an Indian electrical engineering student. He had come from a respected musical family, and they were devasted when he decided to become an engineer. It was the opposite of the US..."Our musician son wants to be...(sob)...an engineer! Where did we go wrong?!?"

[David Emm]

Fascinating essay. My "musical evolution" is a wild melange of pretty much everything but reggae, Chinese opera and early country. As a kid with a 9V AM radio, I quickly decided that country music resembled someone doing bad things to a cat.

 

Then there's the golden abstraction of the path you take because you were lucky enough to be born at the right time. I've had the entire history of music up until the relative "now" at my fingertips for decades. I'm aware of trends, but I'm too restless to stick with them very fiercely. I suspect that a lot of us are such broad listeners, we see it all as a buffet. The gradual changes in "popular" listening rarely appear on my radar.  
 
Still, the point is well-made about timbre. A pal once said of part of my music that it gave him "Synth Patch Fatigue." HA! That's fair, because the temptation of possessing 40K patches triggers my Synth Gland. Some people (like me) love overstuffed kaiju music. OTOH, I also write very simple things at times, to make sure the Eno discipline of doing more with less stays active in my thinking. A pad, an acoustic guitar and a physically modeled woodwind can sound immense when applied gently.

 

Its a shame that FM radio largely got killed off by streaming. I learned of many great musicians from late night or public radio shows clearly curated by serious devotees. Now, search engines pepper you with a hundred songs much like the first one on which you clicked. Its hard to evolve when the distribution  machinery exists to funnel you towards what it wants to sell you. Its the antithesis of growth.

[Notes_Norton]

I play just about every kind of Western music. 

 

My personal evolution (condensed)

When I was a kid I did classical (love the Eastern European Romantics), then evolved into rock, jazz, disco, big band swing, country, R&B, Blues, Salsa, Merengue, Mambo, Calypso, Soca, Reggae, New Age, HipHop, and so on. We even do a bit of Heavy Metal and Rap.

 

I started on drums, because in my then small town all the school's instruments were rented. In retrospect, that was a good foundation, it's helped my other instruments, and allows me to sit in on the kit, and write/record my own drum tracks.

 

I wanted to play baritone horn (Euphonium), but the second wonderful thing happened in my evolution, the tenor sax player moved away. The band director asked who wanted to play the sax, and I guess I was more enthusiastic than the others. I wouldn't have gotten much work playing Euphonium. But then, I wasn't thinking about a career. I took to the sax quickly, and became first in the all-state band every year that I was eligible to compete.

 

Fast Forward >> >> >> I went on the road in a rock band. Not every composer has the good sense to put a sax part in every song, so the guitarist showed me barre chords, and the bass player who also played guitar taught me basic bass. The drummer was a singer, so I would play drums a few songs so he could get up front.

 

Through the years of my evolution, I picked up keyboards, flute, and wind synth. Added vocals (the hardest instrument I've learned so far) and lead guitar. I learned MIDI and learned how to create aftermarket styles for Band-in-a-Box and my own backing tracks for my duo.

 

I've supported myself with music and nothing but music for almost all of my life so far. And I've done so by being versatile. More than one instrument, vocals, and dozens of different genres have been added through the years. I've played jazz in a house band where some of the big stars came to sit in. I opened for big stars in concert while their hits were in the top 10. I played bass for a past his prime but still popular rock singer. I played on cruise ships for 3 years. I was a first call sax/wind synth player in a local studio before home recording, and a stroke put him out of business. I've played singles clubs, dives, yacht clubs, beach bars, resorts, condominiums, and just about any venue a musician can play in.

 

That's my personal evolution.

 

As far as the music is concerned, Big Band Jazz gave us jump blues which gave us early rock and roll which gave us rock, which spawned disco, pop, and everything up to rap.

 

It hasn't been a steady decline in complexity, though. Rock was simpler than the big band jazz that preceded it. But it evolved into a quite complex form in the psychedelic days. Some things from the progressive rock groups were every bit as complex as classical music. But that faded away, and now we have one chord rap — which IMO isn't music and shouldn't be considered that.

 

Let me explain.

 

When I studied, I was taught in order for it to be music, it needs all three elements, melody, harmony, and rhythm. A mockingbird sings melody, but without harmony and rhythm, it isn't music. Crickets give us rhythm, but no melody and harmony. And so on.

 

Rap gives us harmony (at least one chord) and rhythm, but no melody. 

I'm not saying this to hate rap. It's just a different art form, more akin to poetry than music. The beat poets did that in the bop era. Folks like Tex Williams gave us Texas-Fast-Talk (the earliest form of Rap I'm aware of). They are a valid art form, but without all 3 elements, they aren't really music.

 

A song with a melody can have a rap break, which is akin to a drum solo using words instead of drums, and that can be part of a musical song, but if there is nothing on the record but rhythm and harmony, it fails the test.

 

Of course, others will (and should) disagree.

 

Notes ♫

[Stokely]

All I know is, we have enough songs with I - V - vi - IV in whatever order.  All done, thanks, we are set on that one.  Any time I hear some pop song that ISN'T those four chords I'm actually surprised.

Anyway the top reminded me of this early Pentatonix vid   

 

 

[Notes_Norton]

20 hours ago, Stokely said:

All I know is, we have enough songs with I - V - vi - IV in whatever order

With me, that depends on the song. An artist can make a great work of art with a limited palette. 

 

Going to a great art museum like the Prado or Louvre, you will see a multitude of reclining nudes, but a great artist can take the same subject and make something worthy out of it.

Same for sunsets, sailing ships, landscapes, etc.

 

I've heard plenty of pentatonic solos that bore me, and others that thrill me. 

 

For me, it's not the subject or content, but what the artist did to make it speak to me personally.

 

I love a great symphony and a great 12 bar blues songs for the same reason, it moves me.

 

Notes ♫