Tag: music

Louder Music

Music is getting louder and less interesting. scientific proof that music has largely become boring.

Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners’ attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than 50 years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness.

Eurovision


Catching up on Eurovision. Laughing so hard it hurts. observations:

  • eurotrash is everywhere. where is the part of europe where hair metal still rules?
  • ~ 70% of the songs are in english
  • this should be held yearly, internationally. cheaper than the olympics and at least as able of bringing people together
  • almost all the songs are the same. this is probably due to most countries wanting to lose, winning makes you host for the next year, so everyone is in a race to the bottom.

2013-05-18: all the tribal tattoos made me think that new jersey was competing, for a very expansive definition of europe.

Untalented Temp

There might be an equally untalented filmmaker in your office

Having established a reputation among the Flagstone Marketing staff as a quiet and reserved temporary worker, Kevin Bright completely shocked his coworkers this week when it was discovered that, outside the office, the mild-mannered 27-year-old is actually an embarrassingly unskilled singer-songwriter. “I don’t think Kevin’s said more than 5 words to me in the month he’s been here, so I was really surprised to find out he has this whole pitiful music hobby on the side,” said account executive Sandra Hutchinson, 39, who was among several employees that happened by chance to attend one of the soft-spoken and largely forgettable temp’s horrendous sets at a local coffee shop Tuesday.