
Where did the melody go? (2017) - grimoald
https://www.keyboardmag.com/kb-blog/1219
======
aserafini
My issue with this article is that it elevates the ‘melody’ dimension as
somehow more worthy than the ‘sonic texture’ dimension.

I think both have equal merit and I enjoy complexity along both dimensions.

Modern music seems to have the highest sonic texture complexity of any music
so far and is enjoyable for that.

Bach has high melodic complexity but low texture complexity.

I suspect high complexity along all 4 dimensions simultaneously is too much
for the average listener. Artists like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin get close
to being high complexity along every dimension but are regarded as
‘challenging’.

~~~
b1daly
I wouldn’t say modern electronic music has a higher level of ‘sonic texture’
than orchestral music, or any music using traditional instruments. The
difference is that in modern music ‘sonic texture’ is an explicit mode of
“authorial expression.” The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are
arguably richer, as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression
as playable instruments.

It’s just the case that the development of novel acoustics instruments is a
whole separate craft, subject to the annoying vicissitudes of the sonic
properties of physical matter. The instruments were developed over centuries.

As soon as instruments became electrified artists began using the ability to
express themselves directly by manipulating the sounds themselves.

The sonic experimentation dominating modern pop music is entirely the result
of the complete digitization of the sound generating chain.

I also think another factor is that digital synthesizers are woefully
impoverished as instruments capable of expression through musical performance.
Outside of the voice, modern pop is devoid of real-time musical expression.
It’s become a non-real-time process, closer to writing, animation, the visual
arts.

This forces the composer to rely on the native capacities of the instruments
to express ideas, and the one that is completely unavailable in the acoustic
realm is to chain the fundamental timbre of the instrument.

I’m a producer, recording engineer. The author of the original piece is
missing that the only reasons a composer could imagine they were working
primarily with the modes or melody, harmony, rhythm is that there is highly
developed tradition of musicianship and instrument design to fill in the most
fundamental aspect of music, which is the actual sound.

Edit: there is another huge factor in the decline of melody which is the
product of two interrelated technology developments. The first is the use of
loop based sequencing techniques for compositional work, and the second is
that the random-access editing techniques made possible by modern digital
audio workstations extended the loop based composition process to all sounds,
including the voice.

Loops are basically short compositions. If you spend a lot of time in this
mode or composition, your ideas will tend to be short. The actual mechanics of
how the music is made disincline the composer from constructing both
traditional harmony and melody.

The DAW has fundamentally disconnected music from the strict relationship with
linear time that was inherent before the age of recording. To some extent
musical notation allowed composers to work around this, but the end result was
always an expression that had to have a thought out beginning, middle, and
end.

I wrote an essay on this subject that I think is pretty good.
[https://dnamusiclabs.com/harmonic-distortion/daw-and-end-
tim...](https://dnamusiclabs.com/harmonic-distortion/daw-and-end-time)

~~~
Kye
>> _" The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are arguably richer,
as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression as playable
instruments."_

Synths are slowly catching up. You can pack quite a lot of expression into
Serum with two wavetable oscillators, a noise and sub oscillator, modulating
anything by note or velocity, alternate tunings, and a wide range of
modulatable adjustments.

It's not a viola, but you can make some _very_ unique instruments with it.
Most people use it to make yet another dubstep bass or hypersaw, but the
potential is there.

~~~
b1daly
I like Serum a lot, but it has the same set of issues that make all of these
digital synths limited as performance instruments compared to, say, a piano.

The issue starts with the low resolution of MIDI. Most instruments implement
only velocity connected to keys, with max 128 layers of resolution.

A real piano has near infinite resolution on velocity alone.

This exacerbates the issue that digital synths are generally deterministic,
meaning for the same input they produce the same output.

Because the resolution of the controller is so low, attempts to introduce
variety rely on randomness. In an acoustic instrument the same sound cant ever
be produced twice. But this is a result of a complex, chaotic system, not
randomness.

A major factor in the inherently chaotic sound is that each note is exciting
the same physical object, even a note played with the same velocity (like a
disklavier piano system could) will sound different every time based on the
state of the whole large object. As notes are added to a chord or arpeggio,
they are not just superimposed over each other, instead they each contribute
their energy to the whole object.

The use of mod wheels definitely helps with expressiveness in the hands of a
good player.

But my sense is that even “players” are forgoing using these instruments as
performance tools, and instead loop the sections, and piece through the whole
song, listening carefully, modifying the midi data directly based on what they
a hearing.

This has definitely resulted in some very imaginative and striking work, but,
to my ear anyway, it has a very different feel as a mode of artistic
expression. It’s more “cerebral” in some way.

~~~
Kye
MIDI 2.0 will likely improve the situation. 4,294,967,296 possible values
isn't enough to match a real instrument's range, but it's quite a bit better
than 127! Serum has two chaos oscillators that help avoid deterministic-y
music. Too many preset designers skip them.

Take a look at Sphere from Echo Sound Works. They sampled a bunch of real
instruments and used them for wavetables and noises for Serum presets.

[https://kyefox.com/soundware-explorer-sphere-from-echo-
sound...](https://kyefox.com/soundware-explorer-sphere-from-echo-sound-works/)

~~~
NobodyNada
> 4,294,967,296 possible values isn't enough to match a real instrument's
> range

I don't think this is true -- I doubt our ears can recognize a 2^-32
difference in anything, and there's no way physical instruments can be played
with that kind of precision either.

------
SubiculumCode
Does the author mean mainstream "on the radio" pop, or the plethora of music
we not explore and listen to on music services? I've venture to say the Top
100 lists occupy a smaller proportion of today's listeners thane ever before.
We are unconstrained. And melody is out there.

~~~
SubiculumCode
My apologies for the plethora of smartphone typos in the parent comment.

------
jacobolus
> _While nobody knows for sure, it is believed that when music began, the most
> dominant if not the only element was rhythm. No melody, no harmony – just
> rhythm. At first it may have been random objects, and later drums. This may
> have been thousands of years ago, but at the time, that was it._

What is the evidence for this theory? People sing in all sorts of societies
all around the world. Are there even examples of human societies without
singing?

It’s hard for me to imagine some time “thousands of years ago” when there was
no singing or other melodic music of any kind, but only drumming on “random
objects”.

If there are direct examples of 35,000 year old flutes,
[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html)
then presumably this “thousands of years ago” referred to is considerably
older than that.

> _Melody was probably the next element that came into play, mostly through
> the various religious chants; in most cases with little to no rhythmic or
> harmonic context._

Chanting and singing are two significantly different forms, and chanting does
not necessarily have much if any melodic content. It does not seem to me that
one is obviously primary; people continue to do singing and religious chanting
side by side in many cultures.

Maybe there’s some better evidence about this somewhere? It would be nice to
see something more convincing.

~~~
kleer001
IMHO there can be no direct evidence, only speculation.

My thought is that it's easier to make sounds in a rhythm (on/off) than it is
to control the pitch of those sounds (relative to previous sound).

Also thousands, I think, is probably an underestimate by a couple orders of
magnitude.

~~~
jacobolus
It is very weak to say “it is believed that ...” and then make some very large
(frankly implausible) claims without describing _who_ believes this or _why_.

I would maybe give this idea some credibility if it were changed to “millions
of years ago before the evolution of vocal anatomy capable of complex speech”.

But even then... completely speculative.

------
todd8
I recall reading an article on the algorithmic complexity of popular music by
Knuth in 1977. It is really quite funny! See [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Songs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Songs)

------
codesushi42
Modern music has regressed into something primitive and tribal. In other
words, completely mind numbing garbage. And it just gets worse every year.

Post Malone is a good indication of just how fast Western society is falling.

~~~
paulcole
You should hear what my dad had to say about Elvis!

~~~
codesushi42
Not really the same. Rock & roll still had melody and lyrics. Both are
continually being simplified every year.

You should read this: [https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/01/15/231230/is-
pop-mu...](https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/01/15/231230/is-pop-music-
becoming-louder-simpler-and-more-repetitive)

 _5\. A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well-
known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at
finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more
repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better
on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most
repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.

Conclusion: There is some scientific evidence backing the widely voiced
complaint -- on the internet in particular -- that pop music is getting worse
and worse in the 2000s and the 2010s. The music is slower, melodically
simpler, louder, more repetitive, more "I" (first-person) focused, and more
angry with anti-social sentiments. The 2010s got by far the most music quality
down votes with 42% from people polled on which decade has produced the worst
music since the 1970s._

~~~
paulcole
Except the conclusion isn’t scientific at all. It’s 100% based on opinion. The
author identified trends, yes, but that’s about it.

Simpler and more repetitive doesn’t mean worse — it means simpler and more
repetitive. Never once have I listened to a song and thought, “Wow, this
sucks, these lyrics would compress really easily.”

~~~
codesushi42
Simpler and repetitive does mean worse.

~~~
mc_blue
Simpler and repetitive does mean worse - for you. I actually agree with you,
but I know plenty of people that love club/dance music, which is about as
simple and repetitive as you can get. I think it's important to take the
context of the music being played/performed as well: a simple, repetitive
piece would likely not be received well in an orchestra hall, while a song
with complex melody, deep lyrics, and rich harmony would likely be skipped at
a football tailgate party. Music serves several functions in many different
environments, and labeling a piece or style as universally worse is almost
never true.

------
woodandsteel
The author has a lot of good insights about the tends in mass media. However,
there are lots independent artists who support themselves through live
performances and selling cd's.

Another route is youtube and patreon. A good example is the young drummer
Sina, who has over 600,000 subscribers and definitely makes melodic music.
[https://www.youtube.com/user/sinadrumming](https://www.youtube.com/user/sinadrumming)

------
arman_ashrafian
Just saw a great youtube video about this.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Vn9V-tRCo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Vn9V-tRCo)

~~~
zwkrt
Every Frame a Painting has a video talking about how big budget movies tend
not to have recognizable melodies, as well:

[https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs](https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs)

------
musicale
Although the author points to the 17th and 18th centuries (Bach et al.) as the
age of polyphony, polyphonic music and counterpoint were certainly highly
developed in the 15th (Josquin) and 16th (Palestrina) centuries as well.

------
lucas_membrane
When melody was at its apogee, not only did songs have interesting melodies,
but they also had a bridge -- a second section melodically different from the
first. The best songs had seemed to be the ones with the most distinctive
bridges. Somehow, Tin Pan Alley managed to exemplify this artifact from
classical music. Sousa's marches, typically in 3 parts in different keys, with
one foot in the classical tradition and one in the new world stand as a
memorial bridge to melodic non-monotony connecting Brahms to Broadway.

------
todd8
I've tried to introduce my kids (who are college age) to the pleasures of
classical music, mostly to no avail. I just recently rewatched the movie
Amadeus (a 1984 masterpiece on Mozart) with my daughter, and she liked it.

I highly recommend it. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won 8.

~~~
ebruchez
It's a very enjoyable movie, but it's almost pure fiction, just so you know.

~~~
todd8
Yes, Hollywood isn’t very good at presenting the unvarnished truth.

I felt that the movie and particularly Salier’s (fictional?) role as a
competitive observer of Mozart in the movie reifys the absolute genius of
Mozart in a particularly effective way.

I notice that my daughter and her friends now really like Queen’s music
because of _Bohemian Rhapsody_. In addition to _Amadeus_ I’ve suggested _The
Buddy Holly Story_ , _Ray_ , _Coal Miner’s Daughter_ , and _Le Bamba_ to
her—all movies that I really enjoyed that might widen her appreciation of
music outside of what she hears most today.

