Quote:
Originally Posted by grindy
Here's a pretty good response to/debunking of that study and/or people basing opinions about modern music on it.
Don't let the facetiousness distract from the many good points.
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I don't have time to watch the youtube, but I'll check that out later. I just wanted to quickly comment that while you haven't provided a source for your claim, what I usually find is that people tend to misconstrue what these types of studies say.
This is simply looking at chart music through the decades, then quantifying things like time signature, length, timbral palettes and whatnot into numbers in a data set and then running some statistics on that. They reach some conclusions based on the results from that methodology. So the scope of the study is limited. It just says that popular music is more homologous based on the criteria they defined and the metholdology they used.
The news sources covering it add their own understanding of those results. They usually wanna find a slightly bigger perspective so that it's more relevant to readers. Later, when people read such things, they tend to extrapolate further to their own understanding or experience with the world. I did this, mirroring it to evolution by natural selection (though I still try to be aware of the scope of studies). Many may find that they don't think it's a good model for explaining reality as they see it and so they might disagree.`. but they might also have extrapolated that study to encompass or explain more than the authors intended.
Obviously, the amount of various shapes of musical expression goes up over time. There are more expressions of music today than there was 20 years ago.
But is there more innovation? I think most could answer yes or no depending on their definition of innovation. Lets say prog music popularized odd time signatures for a while in the early 70s. Rapping became big in the 80s. If you make rap music to odd time signatures, is that innovation? If yes, is it very innovative or just a little bit? At the heart of the bigger question is quantification, after all. Is there more or less now than before?