
Are Men Singing Higher in Pop Music? - feross
https://pudding.cool/2019/08/register
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iron0013
Haha, so the author actually found that 2019--like the last several years--has
been one of the lowest-singing years of the last few decades, but they decided
to torture the data until they could find a perspective that confirmed the
opposite.

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singlow
Don't be a pitch change denier. Part of the pitch increase problem is the
increased volatility and one season of abnormally low tones does not change
anything. Global consensus is that pitches are on the rise and we must act now
before it goes ultrasonic and us old people can't even hear it anymore.

Oh wait, nevermind, that wouldn't be a bad thing.

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ocschwar
Um, perhaps it's because the entire entertainment industry views tenors as
having talents that are worth developing, and baritones as disposable extras?

(Baritone here. We ARE disposable extras. But can't they pretend at least a
little?)

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mkhpalm
What about country, blues, etc?

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kevin_thibedeau
Country is mostly autotuned pretend singers now.

~~~
puranjay
A friend called country "cowboy hip hop" in that it focuses a lot more on
lyrical ability than actual singing skills

~~~
zapzupnz
Lyrical ability?

Pick-up truck, tight jeans, down by the river, drinking whiskey.

Where's my grammy?

~~~
dymk
Ex took it, along with the dog

~~~
masonic
No, that's Blues

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chkaloon
What I got out of this was how much better the top 100 music of the 70s-80s
was compared to the 2010s. Oh wait, that's right, I'm old.

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personjerry
This article is a hassle to read

~~~
mbreese
Did you read it on a phone or on a large screen? On my phone, it worked great.
My guess is that it was optimized for a small screen.

~~~
rizzin
It's pretty obvious it was designed for a smartphone just by seeing the word
"tap" as soon as you open it.

Viewing it on desktop was an awful experience, mainly because of the
background videos taking up the whole browser window and no ability to adjust
the volume

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BurningFrog
Back in the 70s/80s, I remember opinionated people claiming that the higher
the guys sang, the more commercialized the music was.

Sparks:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAzESJ62irI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAzESJ62irI)

~~~
brigandish
Is it wrong to give upvotes based on the mentioning of Sparks?

I am unrepentent in my sins!

~~~
BurningFrog
This thread is big enough for the both of us!

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jboles
Perhaps everyone is?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennial_whoop](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennial_whoop)

~~~
bscphil
I'm not sure this has anything to do with pitch, but thanks for the link
anyway. As a late millennial, I was pointing this out to people around
2013-2014 as an example of how all new pop music sounded the same. The
Lumineers and Of Monsters and Men (both mentioned in Metzger's piece) were
bands popular with my crowd that are especially guilty of this repetitive
riff.

It seems to have been dying out since then, though I'm sure pop artists will
come up with something equally irritating to put in all their songs.

The name does seem a bit unfair to me. It's not a particularly millennial
thing, it's just what's common in pop music right now. It also doesn't sound
like a "whoop" at all to me, which makes the name doubly confusing.

~~~
dwd
Pop music has always sounded the same, commercial pressure tends to make it
formulaic and apealling to the lowest common denominator.

I used to think that main stream success was a sign that the band I was
listening to had either lost their originality and were no longer cool. My CD
collection used to consist of a lot of 1st, 2nd and occassionally 3rd albums.

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kaycebasques
I was curious if this was related to the Vox Earworm video that just came out
on the subject. Sounds like it was a collaboration. The video is much better
than this pudding.cool article IMO.
[https://youtu.be/qJT2h5uGAC0](https://youtu.be/qJT2h5uGAC0)

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holy_city
Reminds me of pitch inflation [1]. Time is a flat circle in the arts it seems.

[1] [https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/10388/what-is-
the-...](https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/10388/what-is-the-reason-
for-pitch-inflation)

~~~
joppy
Although pitch inflation is referring to changes about as large as a concert A
changing from 440 Hz to 442 Hz, a change of around a tenth of a semitone. The
pitch difference between Barry White and Frankie Valli is more like a few
octaves.

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RickJWagner
Yeah, hard to imagine men singing much higher than Frankie Valli. That guy's
got some pipes.

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humantiy
Now I'm curious if they should do this for women's voices getting lower. It
sounds like it to me that they are. Lady gaga and Lana Del Rey come to mind
for recent examples.

