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It is sad how pop music on a Western model with its 12-tone equal temperament (or an East Asian model with pentatonic equal temperament) has, in the course of i
by Mediterraneo10 8y ago
It is sad how pop music on a Western model with its 12-tone equal temperament (or an East Asian model with pentatonic equal temperament) has, in the course of invading the whole world, gradually marginalized many local traditions that are microtonal. If those local traditions cannot manage to recover on their own, maybe some openness to microtones among Western pop music would help non-Western microtonal musics get more of the limelight.
Unfortunately, as with the highly complex rhythms that RDJ employed in some of his work (e.g. the "drill-and-bass" style), microtones are likely to entertain only a relatively small demographic of anoraks while striking the mainstream as too “weird”.
- cageface 8y agoOne of my biggest disappointments traveling around Asia is that Western pop music is totally ubiquitous here and contemporary Asian pop music sounds just like it. There’s something profoundly depressing about hearing Maroon 5 playing in a little bar in Cambodia.
- coldtea 8y ago>It is sad how pop music on a Western model with its 12-tone equal temperament (or an East Asian model with pentatonic equal temperament) has, in the course of invading the whole world, gradually marginalized many local traditions that are microtonal. Heck, it has also marginalized many local non-microtonal traditions. By the power of marketing money (and thus constant cross-media hammering), cheap thrills for teenagers, cheap sexualization of the singers, and so on, has made most of the global top-ten an image of the increasingly crappier Billboard top-10.