5 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 19.2 ms ] thread
There are plenty of genuinely interesting things to say about song structure, and it bothers me that Knuth treated the whole thing as a joke.

Read http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2015/11421/pdf/Sampl... instead

tendency of popular songs to devolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.

Sounds like a good thing to me. I like music a lot, and most of the time I prefer it straight-up, undiluted by words. To me (non-verbal) music IS the message, and demoting it to a carrier that has to be modulated by a message to be enjoyed is upside-down. (Excepted: talented singers in a foreign language.)