[HN Gopher] Popular songs are simpler and more repetitive than t...
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Popular songs are simpler and more repetitive than they used to be
Author : nradov
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-03-30 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| dinkblam wrote:
| thanks for objectively confirming subjective prejudices
| tiptup300 wrote:
| It seems a lot of vocal older folks will use this as evidence of
| an inferior future. I believe instead that this is probably
| moreso evidence that the systems in power that spread music have
| only grown more efficient both in creating profit as well putting
| out homogeneous simple music.
| drewcoo wrote:
| If "more efficient" means fewer, tighter oligopolies, then you
| and the "vocal older folks" may both be right.
| zachmu wrote:
| Interesting to think of this as an analog to refinement culture,
| where instead of endless elaboration and adding complexity, they
| are stripping away all unnecessary elements to discover the
| platonic ideal of marketable music.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| But refinement culture is all about high quality...
| n4r9 wrote:
| I'd not heard of refinement culture until now. I Googled it
| and it appears to be to do with how sports strategies and
| advertisements are finely tuned to squeeze out the maximum
| probability of success. Which sounds like "heavily optimizing
| for a certain metric" is a better description than "high
| quality", and applies also to pop music.
| raymondh wrote:
| A lot of classic popular songs also had low information content:
|
| https://happyhollyproject.com/2014/04/27/flowcharts-and-song...
| jl6 wrote:
| > according to an analysis of more than 350,000 top 40 hits
|
| Wow, that's a lot of "top 40 hits". More than 134 new "hits" per
| week for the last 50 years! Are these really all "popular" songs?
| Because that number seems like the analysis must cut well into
| the long tail too.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Probably multiple top 40 charts from multiple countries.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Evolution at work.
|
| The music industry is so much more competitive today, in the past
| very few could afford to make music, now anybody can do it.
|
| There is so much supply now that bad songs die much more quickly
| and only the fittest survive.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| The article is about simplistic styles though. There are an
| enormous amount of "bad" songs that don't seem to die.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| How can a song which is liked by tens of millions of people
| be "bad".
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Popular songs are addapting to a mainstream modern listener which
| requires repetitive melodies that are easily memorable
| amelius wrote:
| So why did the preferences of the mainstream modern listener
| change?
| AddLightness wrote:
| Decrease in cultural homogeneity and increase in diversity.
| Have to keep simplifying to appeal to a broader and broader
| audience.
| crowcroft wrote:
| The medium (or in this case the distribution) is the message.
|
| This isn't artist's fault, or 'this generations's' fault. This is
| an industry being pushed by a few algorithms that control the
| diffusion of new music to people which are optimising for this
| kind of thing.
| noduerme wrote:
| It's also the case that song structures have shifted as recording
| and songwriting has become more often sampling and copy/paste
| than capturing an entire live performance. A lot of top 40 songs
| now couldn't even exist without the digital tools that enabled
| them. The use of sampled repeated vocals as background lines
| might skew the results a bit.
| dhosek wrote:
| A pretty information free article. I would note that looking at
| the first singles from the Beatles, they were simple repetitive
| songs (three chords? too complex, let's do two instead!) Add in
| that their baseline of the 70s also would be the apex of the
| popularity of progressive rock.
| jddj wrote:
| Pop music and literature both reached a peak in formulaic-ness
| just in time for the LLMs to codify it.
|
| Maybe if they push it far enough and hard enough in that
| direction we'll get some cultural pushback / revival?
| f6v wrote:
| You can't blame people. Our ancestors probably went into a state
| of trance with much simpler "music". The brains didn't change all
| that much since then.
| teddyh wrote:
| Music Was Better in the Sixties, Man (2012)
| <https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/music-was-bett...>
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| This all depends on your era of course. How many 12 bar blues
| songs are there I wonder, hundreds of thousands perhaps?
| Rury wrote:
| I'm not sure they make the correct conclusion (ie that people
| necessarily prefer simpler music when facing options).
|
| I think it's more that... to be popular, you need to fit the
| tastes of many people, and the best way to do that is by being
| generic, rather than specialized or niche. So pop music is
| essentially about finding the common denominators in tastes, and
| sticking to only those features. Obviously that's going to lead
| to music which is simpler, more repetitive, and therefore broadly
| appealing. And it's the music industry which selects for this, as
| it's the most profitable formula (and the reason for the trend of
| things getting simpler over time).
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Songs are a lot more than their lyrics and there are a great many
| wonderful and popular songs that have _no lyrics at all_. Lyrical
| complexity isn't really a good measure of the overall complexity
| of a song.
|
| Anyway, a lot of this because of the rise of dance music which is
| often more about rhythm and timbre, and vocals if they exist at
| all are often background and used more as texture than as the
| driving force behind the song.
| deldelaney wrote:
| How soon until AI replaces simple Autotune Kanye? With deep
| Autotune Kanye.
| c6400sc wrote:
| _Researchers compiled lyrics to songs from five musical genres
| (rap, country, pop, R &B, and rock) that were released between
| 1970 and 2020._
|
| This is an interesting period to sample. The late 60s and early
| 70s were a high watermark for pop and rock music. Pop music
| evolved considerably from the 40s (Crooners and jazz-dominant
| hits), through the 50s and early 60s ("the American Songbook"),
| to the emergence of psychedelic rock and the cerebral singer-
| songwriter in the 60s. The increased prominence of genres light
| rock in the 70s and hair metal in the 80s would drag complexity
| down.
|
| I think if they took the period 1920-2020, the trend would not be
| prominent.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Glad someone finally quantified what everyone is obviously
| noticing.
|
| At this juncture, since the entertainment industry can't take
| risks anymore for new ideas, it's high tine that AI simply
| displace it entirely.
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