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I've been attending a lot of edm festivals lately. I can't help but think popular music has moved to become much more timbre based opposed to harmonic based du

I've been attending a lot of edm festivals lately. I can't help but think popular music has moved to become much more timbre based opposed to harmonic based due to the complex human subjectivity. Its much harder to model timbre to harmony than melody to harmony.

te_chris 8y ago
It’s not due to the complex subjectivity. It’s due to the medium, I.e daw’s which discourage complex time and harmonic arrangement in favour of encouraging massive sound design, via their UI’s
- mojuba 8y ago
  That's an interesting point but I don't think it explains why music as a whole is going where it's going: from melodies and harmonies towards a more general art of sound. After all DAWs are created to accommodate the need, not the other way around. One of the reasons why it's happening may be that harmonies are pretty much exhausted and most of music in this sense is just a reiteration of the past. Apart from some innovation in jazz and progressive rock music, both being in stagnation (i.e. practically dead), nothing else is new in terms of melodies and harmonies.
  - jcelerier 8y ago
    > After all DAWs are created to accommodate the need, not the other way around. DAWs were created for this point. But for a lot of artists nowadays, their whole window into the music-making world is their DAW, and as such, the roles have somewhat reversed, the DAW serving as inspiration for the work and providing the limits of it. I remember reading a paper a few years ago where they showed that just the color skin used for your DAW had an effect on the music you produced. Humans are fairly influencable.
    - acceit 8y ago
      > I remember reading a paper a few years ago where they showed that just the color skin used for your DAW had an effect on the music you produced. I'd love a link for this.
      - jcelerier 8y ago
        I can't find exactly the one I'm thinking about but here are a few on this topic : - a whole phd on exactly the subject of this debate: https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/34478/Macchiusi_Ian_A_2017_PhD.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10... - http://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/experiencing-musical-composition-in-the-daw-the-software-interface-as-mediator-of-the-musical-idea-2/ http://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/experiencing-musical-compo... - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Josh_Mycroft/publication/308078381_The_Influence_of_Graphical_User_Interface_Design_on_Critical_Listening_Skills/links/57d9492a08ae0c0081efaaff/The-Influence-of-Graphical-User-Interface-Design-on-Critical-Listening-Skills.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Josh_Mycroft/publicatio...
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    The DAC was a tool used to edit sound. Now the DAC is an instrument. That's the difference. From a classical producer's perspective, we could say that the 'new music' now is a function of production. A slightly different view would simply be to say that the Engineer/Producer is the artist. Someone made a comment about rock/jazz not evolving much ... well, you need people who can actually play instruments! It takes massive work, talent, skill. People who isolate themselves for long periods. I know being a DAC/artists requires work ... but it's altogether of a different kind. I appreciate soundscape art, but not not as much as live music. FYI though maybe Brian Eno et. al. were the first to really take advantage of the tech, I have to think of DJ Sasha's album, Airdrawndagger as kind of seminal. It was a fully a producers album.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      The DAW isn't really an instrument. All DAWs are a combination of (tape-like) linear recording, with a sampling rack, a synth rack, and an FX rack attached. The instruments are the samplers, synthesizers, loops, and FX. The proportions vary - Ableton plays up the sampling, ProTools plays up the linear tape and FX - but they're all more or less the same product, which is a digital implementation of a late 1980s recording studio with project recall and much more powerful automation. To use a DAW as an instrument the design would have to be opened up and made much more configurable and programmable. Products that do this a little exist (e.g. M4L in Ableton, which is descended from Max/MSP, which is used by Autechre) but they're always limited and/or clumsy to program and invariably not very popular. It turns out most DAW users are very comfortable with the studio metaphor and only a tiny minority have any interest in exploring beyond it. They either find their way to modular synthesisers, which are a different kind of dead end, or Max/PD, which (IMO) are a bit of a nightmare to use (PD less than Max), or maybe one of the code based environments like SuperCollider, which are much more open but so user-hostile you need a good grounding in CS and command-line development to use them at all. To date no one has made a code-based album that has had any mainstream success.
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        I'm very familiar with the tech, and I understand my comment about DAW being an instrument is a little metaphorical ... but the Engineering/Production is now where the material creativity happens. Obviously it's not happening in 'real time' - but rather, by tuning each bar, each phrase, applying different effects etc. hence they are 'playing that instrument'. Songwriting, melody, possibly musicianship and definitely lyrics are kind of secondary. You can say anything in a song these days it doesn't matter.

te_chris 8y ago

It’s not due to the complex subjectivity. It’s due to the medium, I.e daw’s which discourage complex time and harmonic arrangement in favour of encouraging massive sound design, via their UI’s

mojuba 8y ago
That's an interesting point but I don't think it explains why music as a whole is going where it's going: from melodies and harmonies towards a more general art of sound. After all DAWs are created to accommodate the need, not the other way around. One of the reasons why it's happening may be that harmonies are pretty much exhausted and most of music in this sense is just a reiteration of the past. Apart from some innovation in jazz and progressive rock music, both being in stagnation (i.e. practically dead), nothing else is new in terms of melodies and harmonies.
- jcelerier 8y ago
  > After all DAWs are created to accommodate the need, not the other way around. DAWs were created for this point. But for a lot of artists nowadays, their whole window into the music-making world is their DAW, and as such, the roles have somewhat reversed, the DAW serving as inspiration for the work and providing the limits of it. I remember reading a paper a few years ago where they showed that just the color skin used for your DAW had an effect on the music you produced. Humans are fairly influencable.
  - acceit 8y ago
    > I remember reading a paper a few years ago where they showed that just the color skin used for your DAW had an effect on the music you produced. I'd love a link for this.
    - jcelerier 8y ago
      I can't find exactly the one I'm thinking about but here are a few on this topic : - a whole phd on exactly the subject of this debate: https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/34478/Macchiusi_Ian_A_2017_PhD.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10... - http://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/experiencing-musical-composition-in-the-daw-the-software-interface-as-mediator-of-the-musical-idea-2/ http://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/experiencing-musical-compo... - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Josh_Mycroft/publication/308078381_The_Influence_of_Graphical_User_Interface_Design_on_Critical_Listening_Skills/links/57d9492a08ae0c0081efaaff/The-Influence-of-Graphical-User-Interface-Design-on-Critical-Listening-Skills.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Josh_Mycroft/publicatio...
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  The DAC was a tool used to edit sound. Now the DAC is an instrument. That's the difference. From a classical producer's perspective, we could say that the 'new music' now is a function of production. A slightly different view would simply be to say that the Engineer/Producer is the artist. Someone made a comment about rock/jazz not evolving much ... well, you need people who can actually play instruments! It takes massive work, talent, skill. People who isolate themselves for long periods. I know being a DAC/artists requires work ... but it's altogether of a different kind. I appreciate soundscape art, but not not as much as live music. FYI though maybe Brian Eno et. al. were the first to really take advantage of the tech, I have to think of DJ Sasha's album, Airdrawndagger as kind of seminal. It was a fully a producers album.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    The DAW isn't really an instrument. All DAWs are a combination of (tape-like) linear recording, with a sampling rack, a synth rack, and an FX rack attached. The instruments are the samplers, synthesizers, loops, and FX. The proportions vary - Ableton plays up the sampling, ProTools plays up the linear tape and FX - but they're all more or less the same product, which is a digital implementation of a late 1980s recording studio with project recall and much more powerful automation. To use a DAW as an instrument the design would have to be opened up and made much more configurable and programmable. Products that do this a little exist (e.g. M4L in Ableton, which is descended from Max/MSP, which is used by Autechre) but they're always limited and/or clumsy to program and invariably not very popular. It turns out most DAW users are very comfortable with the studio metaphor and only a tiny minority have any interest in exploring beyond it. They either find their way to modular synthesisers, which are a different kind of dead end, or Max/PD, which (IMO) are a bit of a nightmare to use (PD less than Max), or maybe one of the code based environments like SuperCollider, which are much more open but so user-hostile you need a good grounding in CS and command-line development to use them at all. To date no one has made a code-based album that has had any mainstream success.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      I'm very familiar with the tech, and I understand my comment about DAW being an instrument is a little metaphorical ... but the Engineering/Production is now where the material creativity happens. Obviously it's not happening in 'real time' - but rather, by tuning each bar, each phrase, applying different effects etc. hence they are 'playing that instrument'. Songwriting, melody, possibly musicianship and definitely lyrics are kind of secondary. You can say anything in a song these days it doesn't matter.