Yes! Also why the (I think actually quite useful in some ways) "less melodic complexity" study reports I've seen immediately break down when they go from a technical analysis of what has happened -- more words in fewer notes -- and try to find aesthetic or social meaning
"How complex could this language be? There are only 26 letters and a bunch of them are basically dupes."
new musical mode just dropped, NO SKIPS
“Congratulations you just invented glissando 🙄”
I remember feeling frustrated trying to write songs as a teenager: "everything already sounds like something else!" Songwriting got much easier once I realised that was a good thing
There’s an episode of “Blossom” where Joey is trying to write a song and it keeps sounding like “Thriller” which I thought was funny because it’s a very weird song and hard to “steal”! afaict someone has successfully done this once and it’s one of my favorite songs m.youtube.com/watch?v=4jWL...
There's Nothing 3 Chords Can't Fix For You Baby
when i started university the first degree i ended up studying for was a music degree (i was vastly underqualified so i switched) and man, the amount of guys there who were so technically proficient and absolute theory wizzes... who could not write an effective pop song to save their lives. christ.
they were polite guys! they'd play lovely songs for us all during lunch! but in your feedback you'd have to focus as much as you could on complimenting their playing because you could never be so impolite as to say that the bit where they dipped into 13/8 for two bars was in service of nothing.
if you did say something, it'd be a bit like *that* bit from Spinal Tap. "why didn't you just stay in 6/8 and play something really resonant and memorable for that specific two bar phrase, and then you wouldn't have to go into 13/8 just to shake things up" ".... but we went into 13/8". etc.
one article-object i've always wanted to create is to take something from the western canon and analyze it using strictly the theory of indian classical music, which would inevitably lead to the conclusion that it's unfocused, childish, and lacking in any kind of complexity
I also hate how a lot of this gets unnecessarily turned into culture war. The study that found chord progressions were getting simpler immediately got accused of being anti-hip-hop when the data showed hip-hop actually had MORE key changes than pop in the late 10s - it was the Sicko Mode era!
Yeah, to me the story the data was telling was one I was hearing -- which is that pop that was at most influenced by elements of hip-hop (though there are more ways to cram more words in your song than "be like hip-hop") had simplified dramatically while hip-hop itself got more sonically interesting
Yeah, but because of how poisonous the discourse has been a lot of people revealed their understanding of what hip-hop sounds like is still stuck in 1986