There are other things like runs in scales having too many notes—using too many half steps along the scale (for my taste at least) so it sounds less intentional and like they are just running through notes. Reminds me of the jazz joke—the point is to hear the notes they aren't playing. Well...
The instrument solos are a good example (though the phrasing for these is so weird)—the clarinet has more space than the saxophone. BUT the clarinet solo is so short, and the song returns to the top of the progression even though we were further along in the phrase.
Then, only a few bars later, we have a sax solo. This is very wacky and sounds very off to me. So even though technically the thing is playing the "right" notes and it sounds mostly like Bossa nova, it still sounds very wrong to me. I could go on a lot, but this feels like way too much already.
this is exactly the analysis i hoped for!! thank you!
ahhh and i think this explains why it’s so unsatisfying
seems like an excellent parallel to llm “writing,” where it just keeps over-egging it, with little asides and double or triple adjectives and so on, bc it has no sense of taste and also doesn’t even hold a whole paragraph in “memory” while it “writes”
Yes, I think this is exactly it! And that lack of sense of memory is really uncanny here too, because I think it is true—it has no memory for this song, even though the structure demands that you return to the top and repeat refrains. It does it, but it doesn’t know when to do it.
and the wrongness comes thru even tho i don’t really know anything *explicitly* about musical structure, only tacitly.
Yeah, especially because you actually like cha cha/bossa nova music, so you have a good feel for it. And I think most people that listen to music will have absorbed at least some of that because it is such a human thing, and we absorb the cultural history of the composition by experiencing it.
i have a feel for it, but not enough to point at any specific flaws! which is unusual for me bc i’m really good at patterns. but music hits a different part of my brain. i really wish a real musician would make an album like this, bc the concept rules.
Yeah, I would love to get a resurgence of actually great bossa nova with fun concepts! I wish I'd worked on composition basically at all. 😢 Regarding patterns etc. it did remind me of this fashion thread (absorbing culture and having a feel without maybe knowing specifics) bsky.app/profile/diew...
I dunno, maybe my brain just always wants to come back around to "LLMs are just badly dressed conservatives" It isn't a direct 1-to-1, but the idea that we absorb the history of our culture and have a sense for what works based on it. The semiotics of dress is closely tied to music too, after all!
i agree with you that they’re fundamentally anti-human and anti-life, which makes them if not “conservative” at least narcissistic and probably fash
Yes, that is more precise and a better descriptor than my "conservative" *nods*
a word that has been tortured beyond meaning anyway!! i don’t know how people can fail to value the fact that art is art because a human made it, and that’s it. bottom line.