5 ms·
No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.
by intalentive 3y ago
No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.
- lwelyk 3y agoI wasn't aware there was an objective 1-to-1 correlation between the complexity of music to its quality.
- intalentive 3y agoThere's not but it's a good heuristic. In pop music the average entropy is much lower, not only because the songs are simpler, but because they are more alike.
- TremendousJudge 3y agoAre you quoting that "Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music" paper? Anybody who knows about music disagrees with its methods. Here's a good rundown by a classical composer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8
- nradov 3y agoSince you're not required to listen to pop music, the average entropy is utterly irrelevant. If you prefer more complex music there is a huge amount out there, probably more than you can listen to. Average artwork has always been garbage throughout human history. But I still found a few good paintings to hang on my walls. As long as you can get what you want it doesn't really matter what else is out there.
- ctoth 3y ago> Since you're not required to listen to pop music, Is there a trick I'm missing to avoid this in {Ubers, grocery stores, bars, ...}? If so I'd love to know about it! Note: am blind, so can't constantly wear earplugs.
- colpabar 3y agoOkay, but you know that "good" and "worse" and subjective, relative terms? Just because you have your own reasons for something doesn't make them "objective", you just don't like modern pop music.
- stale2002 3y agoOk, so since it is all "subjective" then you have to concede that a song which is just 1 hour of a single note being played is equally good. Or maybe, instead of devolving into absurdity we can just say that there are come qualities of being better or worse that most people can agree on. Of course, you can simply bite the bullet and say "yep. The song with 1 note in it is subjectively just as good".
- bazoom42 3y ago> there are come qualities of being better or worse that most people can agree on Maybe, but enough people like modern day pop music, so by that criteria it is good.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoThe only heuristic that matters the quality of pop music is "do people like it" and it's almost a tautology that pop music in any given time period passes it. If people preferred more complicated music, then more complicated music would be popular and more of it would get made.
- math_dandy 3y agoYou’re right about the average, but that single summary statistic is too coarse. There’s probably much more great music being produced now than ever before, but there’s much much much more crappy music. And recommendation algorithms aren’t optimizing for quality.
- intalentive 3y agoSpecifically I mean pop music. What you find on the radio, what is most heavily promoted, what gets the most streams + sales.
- some-guy 3y agoWhat does “complexity” even mean here? Is modern music any less complex than “I Want to Hold Your Hand”?
- intalentive 3y agoThere are different ways to measure complexity: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00674/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0067... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/ Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive. Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.
- TremendousJudge 3y agoI notice that the authors of that paper are two physicists and a data scientist. I wonder if they even consulted a musicologist or a composer with a background in research before publishing this paper. What would you think about a paper on programming that featured no computer scientists?
- MrDrMcCoy 3y ago[dead]
- whycome 3y agoWe're running out of chords. They've all been mined. We can't make new ones.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago> Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive. The Beatles used three chord progressions for everything with very little variation. Modern music has far more variety.
- starlevel003 3y ago> The average complexity is at all time lows. there's more than enough breakcore out there if you measure music quality like that. theree's definitely more than in the 20th century.
- booleandilemma 3y agoWhat an HN comment. "Is this song good?" "One sec, let me check how complex it is"
- seabass-labrax 3y ago"500 notes per second! Irish dance is the winner!"
- dmonitor 3y agoLook up King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard if you want complex music. Polygondwanaland especially if you want something really out there.
- ROTMetro 3y agoComplexity left to right may have gone down, but top to bottom has gone up. In a DAW people add way more tracks than ever and add all kinds of detail/texture/layers the weren't possible before so yeah, people search out the new and novel to experiment/have fun with. That happens all the time in music. No one used distorted electric guitars in music then all of the sudden music was over saturated in it. Just because you might not understand/recognize the current complexity doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- vunderba 3y agoIf you're gonna make that argument than music peaked during the contrapuntal period and anything post-baroque is simply romantic drivel.