I used to make fun of Medium by calling it Tedium, then this site came out which is one of the wonders of the web and makes me think, ‘why the hell does anybody care what happens to Twitter?’ I mean, this guy listened to more than 1000 songs and explains music theory and how you edit music on a computer today, while Medium bloggers tell me how impressed they were to get 70 views on an article and people on Twitter think it is their constitutional right to say “A TRANS WOMAN IS A WOMAN. PERIOD.” or a “A TRANS WOMAN WILL NEVER BE A WOMAN. PERIOD.”
What’s priceless is having the opportunity to think something through and explain it and Tedium rises above the shitposting world. Bravo!
That's particularly extremely important when the thread is fresh, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Tossing flamebait in like this risks ruining the entire thing.
That, is an excellent simile-example (?), and made it clearer for me. Clear enough to say "I don't know!".
It feels almost as if the answer is "they are a component of the whole, but not musicians by themselves". i.e. the beat can't be music by itself, but the vocals for example, can.
I don't fully believe that though, and am leaning more towards a beat being able to be music by itself too. You can see my dilemma though :P
I guess GP sat down, and thought about it. I do that myself time to time, then I realize that despite to my best efforts I can't defend some common sense ideas, and must accept it as false. Usually hard to even explain.
.. just think about it with an open mind, or try to even defend that drummers are musicians. I think most definitions of musicians don't include drummers much more than the costume designers or the publishers. (They work in the music industry, make music better, but can't and don't create music themselves alone.) I lean towards that they are not musicians.
Also if GGGP doesn't classify hiphop or rap as music, then the "but the drummers are usually classified as musicians too" argument doesn't work on many levels.
I'd call drummers "musicians" because the drums (which have rhythm) are a necessary part of the musical composition, and the drummer is performing that integral part of the music.
What's harder to decide, IMO, is whether a drum solo really constitutes "music".
If rap isn't music, then is a drum solo also not music?
Personally, I can't stand most rap, but I also get bored with drum solos and usually skip them, even if I otherwise really love the drum parts of the band's other songs.
Rap is almost all rhythm, almost no harmony or melody. Drums are all rhythm, no harmony or melody. How the hell is that "reactionary"? It's just a basic fact.
Either you opened your mind a touch too much or you’re just being contrarian. Hard to tell.
I would be very interested to see any published definition of “musician” or “music” in a dictionary that would exclude drums.
The comparison of drummers to costume designers and publishers is so weak that I find it hard to believe you actually think this.
I am also glad that you brought the conversation back to rap. My original analogy of rap to drumming wasn’t very good, because a huge majority of rap music does have melody, harmony, form, and rhythm, no different than any other genre of music.
There is no dilemma. Rhythm is an utterly fundamental, inseparable part of music. If anything, it's arguably more fundamental than melody (and certainly more so than harmony).
Just try getting a computer to play the notes of some of your favourite tunes with equal - or, better, random - duration and weighting if you want to be convinced of that. Also observe that music without melody can be found everywhere, from rap to Steve Reich to the Kodo Drummers, but to exclude rhythm relegates you to the really out there stuff like 4'33" (complete silence) or music composed of randomly timed or continuously varying sounds.
We have perfectly good terms to distinguish between rhythm and melody such as, you know, "rhythm" and "melody". Your instinctive desire to define "music" so as to somehow exclude rhythm is simply wrong.
> Also observe that music without melody can be found everywhere, from rap to Steve Reich
Steve Reich would dispute this, with gusto. You can only possibly make the claim that he ever composed non-melodic sound in his earliest years (e.g. "Come Out"), but even then he was fascinated by the implicit melodic signatures of otherwise non-melodic music (realized later in a piece like Different Trains, where he explicitly has instruments play the melody of spoken words).
I didn't say he only made non-melodic music. I don't see on what basis he or anyone would describe Clapping Music (which I recently saw performed at a school concert, hence it being on my mind), for example, as melodic.
People have felt that way about folk music, blues music, atonal music, pop music, bebop music, avant garde electronic music, rock 'n roll music, hip hop music, EDM, etc etc etc etc
word for word. it's anti-black culture war nonsense, whether they know it or are just parroting it. and it's not even accurate, showing a basic ignorance of the genre
You can dance to pure rhythm, without melody. You can't dance to a melody without any rhythm. If follows that rhythm is more fundamental to music than melody, even though you usually need both.
Shouldn't the move to digital recording also made the ability to make key changes much easier? Frequent key changes in music are supposed to be difficult for musicians to handle, but in the bass example shown adding a key change would have meant you need to record four notes rather than two.
...also that the tech that made it 'technically easier' was easily aquired by less-trained musicians who really didn't care about key changes.
Happy to say i grew up stoned and listened to some of the dirgiest drivel you could ever find - and loved every moment of it.
Learning to compose introduced 'choices': should it change....why...what am i trying to achieve...is it required?
Sorry - Cant get to link but there's a canadian musician on yt that plays guitar solos for quite some time over the same looped backing tracks. Lovely stuff.
In Swedens top 20 (Svensktoppen) the key change became a ridiculed trope. See, Sweden top 20 is for Swedish musichians only. The imported (American and British mostly) music had a separate list, "Tracks".
Neither of the lists was based on sales by the way, since the state media monopoly was supposedly non-commercial.
Anyway the Sweden top 20 stuff stayed dance-based (think jitterbug, not rave).
Somewhere someone started talking about the key change. Even non-musichians learned to hear and point out the key change (easy, almost always the last refrain). Sweden top 20 leaned in to it. More humor oriented songs now include the key change in the lyrics ("here comes the pull-up).
The author, by making this claim, lays bare the fact that they do not know about Eurovision.
Key changes are so common in Eurovision songs that it is mentioned in the ultimate Eurovision spoof song "Love Love Peace Peace", which also features at least one key change: https://youtu.be/Cv6tgnx6jTQ
The reports of the death of the key change, dare I say, are greatly exaggerated.
I'd rather say that what works in that huge party simply doesn't necessarily work outside of it, at least not everywhere. The ESC is still crazy successful, at 161 Million viewers this year worldwide.
At least in the UK - people are watching with a mixture of morbid fascination and ironic glee. I've never met anyone who thinks it's a valid forum for good pop music.
They chart nowhere. That’s not the point. Noticing that key changes are still popular at what is one of the most popular song contest in the world is however very relevant to a discussion about the public taste.
They most certainly chart in Sweden, here's the chart from May 14th (the day after the the Eurovision finals) [1]. This is "Svensktoppen", a very long-running list of top-played Swedish songs in Swedish radio. Off the top of my head, positions 1, 3, 4 and 5 were all candidates for Eurovision (and the song in position #3 was the one that competed in Eurovision).
In Swedish, this key change is generally called a "schlagerhöjning", where "schlager" [2] is the broad genre word for the type of songs that compete in the Eurovision. The term is old, obviously there's a rather wide genre spread these days but it used to be more same-same.
Edit: added a "Swedish" above, I did not realize that the chart only lists Swedish music, saw another comment mention this. Very weird of me.
I don't have the numbers but I would be cautious there. Some US music is listened in other countries, but not all of it. Not everything is easily exportable.
Also there are local musicians popular in each country. And there are musicians from countries other than the US that are international but unknown in the US.
Anyway, Eurovision is quite irrelevant in Europe too :)
Edit... for native English speakers, consider this: there're songs in which the lyrics are more important than music. That kind of music is usually boring if you can't understand what they're saying.
Anecdotally, most of the music I heard when I was travelling in South America wasn't American music. Same thing with South East Asia.
Look at the Billboard (or equivalent) charts for Germany, France, Argentina, or any other non-Anglo country; maybe 10% of the entries are English language or from American artists.
I watch Eurovision for the laughs, and because I enjoy it as an anachronism that flies in the face of the internet's frictionless free market optimisation. But lately the acts have started all singing in English, and generally getting a bit X Factor-ish, so maybe its time is sadly drawing to a close.
The winners in 2021 sang Italian metal, the winners in 2022 sang Ukranian rap and folk music. I unfortunately think it's inevitable to get more bland and optimized contributions, but the last winners have shown that the audience likes novelty.
Key changes are very popular in song contests because they allow the (live) singer to show off their skills.
But key changes are not popular in popular (sic) songs. Very few EuroVision songs transition to the radio/....
You can easily tell which songs were mostly influenced by a singer (made for them) or by a producer (made for plays/profit). Stuff which is popular with singer, elaborate vocal constructions don't typically make for a good song.
Which is why you need a producer to say NO to the singer if you want a popular song. Of course, the singer can be the producer, but it's a different skill set.
This is related to the real reason key changes no longer chart, they are a cliche. You are no more likely to get a song with cheesy modulations into the Billboard top 100 than you are a book that starts "it was a dark and stormy night" into the New York Times bestseller list.
In Eurovision though, the cheese is part of the fun.
Trying to comprehend the idea that "key changes are cliche". No. Maybe certain patterns are cliche, but there are so many interesting things you can do with key changes that the remark is just silly.
But it isn't just key changes that have gone away. We used to let drummers speed up and slow down with the emotion of the song. Now we want everything on a grid for ease of production, we pitch-correct even when it isn't really needed, we sample sounds rather than have real musicians play. The result of all that is that songs have a narrower envelope of variation, and they tend to be more simplistic.
I think one reason for having fairly consistent pitch and rhythm in popular dance music is that it can make it easier for club DJs and can help to keep people moving. Digital DJ decks can help, but shifting pitch or tempo too far can sound (and feel) jarring and unnatural.
Though with traditional vinyl the pitch can shift as one record is sped up or slowed down to match the tempo of another. It can be challenging to simultaneously match both the tempo and tuning of two vinyl records.
As noted in the article, grid-based tools do seem to be designed to facilitate loop-based production. But Logic is also frequently used for soundtracks and certainly supports key and tempo changes. Moreover the chromatic piano grid used in many DAWs and sequencers seems more key agnostic than a staff with a key signature. Not only that, but some DAWs (Ableton Live for example) are very good at processing samples so that their rhythm and tuning can easily be adjusted.
The same people that have produced Eurovision for something like a decade is now making American song contest, where states compete against each other. I'm not convinced it will work, but we'll see.
One reason to use a key change is to move the lead vocalist to a different part of their range. You can get a different sound to a too often repeated chorus or let them do a variation on the melody which would have been undelightful in the original key.
Also, as a bass player. I don’t care. I mean, I’ll whine if you go to Gb, but it’s mostly just for form. Any awkwardness in fitting low lines on the instrument is more than made up by telling a guitar player to play the Cb chord.
I don’t care if it is a trope, I miss key changes. Maybe because I grew up in the 80s and early 90s where it was common. But I have a fondness for songs that had them.
Some songs did them in a way that was predictable, just following the formula of others, but some did them really well.
One stand-out example, to me, is how Seal closes the song “People Asking Why” (around the 3:16 mark):
My hypothesis is that you can choose any aspect of composition that musicians find exciting and note the same decline over time. You don't have to be a music theorist to observe that by and large, today's music has been dumbed down in comparison. On a scale from "most producer friendly" to "art" it's definitely leaning heavily to the left.
You can especially note that when it comes to harmonies, and harmonic shifts (aka key changes) are not the only aspect that has been greatly simplified. Elaborate harmonies are just not a thing anymore.
And that's not just the typical effect that old generations cannot relate as much to the music of new generations. No, it's that today's taste - which, of course, has been mostly shaped by the exposure to today's music - appreciates songs that are, from a musician's perspective, much simpler in almost every aspect. The only exception that I can think of is that the performance capabilities of the singer have been put much more in the focus, so you can find songs today that are really difficult to sing well. This is mostly true for female performers, though, and the beginnings of that trend can probably be traced back to Whitney Houston and especially Mariah Carey, who made a certain Coloratura-style of singing fashionable.
I think hardly anyone will dispute the observation that today's music business is much more professionalized than it had already been since the beginning of recording technology. And that goes to tell. It really _is_ a business, and the process of producing a hit song has been streamlined tremendously.
Of course, we need to keep in mind that the focus of the article (as well as my comment) is on chart pop music. And of course, this is a big-picture kind of observation, not claiming that you couldn't cite some (however, rare) exceptions here and there. A thriving alternative scene with much more elaborate song writing has never ceased to exist, but that's not what gets played on your average top-40 radio station (for the youngens: "streams").
Key changes that just abruptly shift a repeating pop chorus near the end of a song by a step or half step are pretty dumb though; it's not clear that losing them specifically is a dumbing down.
I agree. I think it's simply that this thing which used to sometimes happen now never happens, thus making the music more predictable and further lowering the entropy rate of music as a stochastic process.
Sure. But there are lots and lots of Beatles songs (for example) that shift keys in the main verse, often very early in the song (and often several times).
Key changes used to be something most bands handled easily, and the best songwriters got a lot of mileage out of it.
I think we are seeing a much longer tail in music consumption. This kinda “squeezes” the top into a much less dynamic place.
As everybody has a more individual selection of music, due to easy and cheap access to almost all published music ever, the common denominator becomes smaller.
> today's music has been dumbed down in comparison.
People have been saying that as long as popular music have existed. Jazz was considered dumb and unsophisticated, crooners were considered dumb and unsophisticated, rock music was considered dumb and unsophisticated.
Each of these genres just discard previous measures of sophistication and introduce their own. The article have an interesting observation about "vertical" vs "horizontal" songwriting. Newer music is just different.
Kendrick Lamar is not dumbed down compared to Bon Jovi just because he doesn't change the key before that last chorus.
Absolutely - the criticism of most guitarists only knowing 3 chords goes back afaik to the first bard who ever strung up a lute. I also think although we remember the songs that break molds, at any moment in history most popular music tends to be relatively simple. There's nothing wrong with that I think - just as people don't (or probably shouldn't) eat caviar and filet mignon at every meal, much of the time music serves as more of an idle distraction than some intense spiritual experience.
While I agree with your overall point, a longstanding previous trend does not indicate a present trend. This is a popular "fallacy fallacy". The metrics of evaluation can change while dumbing down still occurs.
If you look at the demographics of top 40 listeners today compared to forty years ago, the popularity of the hits are more narrowly confined to teens and young adults, particularly in the working class US and in developing Latin American countries. You can also look at the ethos of the top genres, such as rap and country, which are less broadly appealing than popular genres of the past such as rock, R&B, or even jazz.
This is driven by economics. Young people have more free time than adults, and they have greater access to music than they did in the pre-Internet age. So unless we think young music streamers have comparable taste to music-buying adults of the past, it seems likely that dumbing down to a certain point to meet the audience's expectations is more profitable than the alternative.
> If you look at the demographics of top 40 listeners today compared to forty years ago, the popularity of the hits are more narrowly confined to teens and young adults
I didn't know that. Can you point me to the source of these numbers? I would like to know more.
I didn't cite any numbers. You can look up the age discrepancies between AM/FM during the early 80s. FM was dominated by the 12-24 demo, but the music industry was attached to AM and reacted slower to audience research back then. If you prefer a qualitative approach, you can look at the charts from the late 70s/early 80s and compare them to today.
> If you look at the demographics of top 40 listeners today compared to forty years ago, the popularity of the hits are more narrowly confined to teens and young adults
So how do I look at these demographics and confirm this claim?
The business really isn't any more professionalised than it used to be. The popular music business has a long history going all the way back to popular printed sheet music in the 19th century. It's always been mercenary, manipulative, and cynical. Simon Napier-Bell - who used to manage Wham! and other familiar names - has written some fascinating books about it. They're a must read for anyone interested in the history.
There are always competing forces pulling music towards simplicity and complexity. Whenever the complexity is squashed in one place it comes back in another.
The biggest change over the last decade or so has been increasingly ornate production. In the 80s mixes were semi-automated, but you couldn't do much except change levels. Now you can automate everything - levels, EQ, EQ type, effects, effect parameters - with extreme precision and accuracy.
So most modern mixes have constant subtle changes. They don't leap out like a key change, but (for example) the vocal tone and the effects on the vocal will often change phrase by phrase. Or even word by word.
I don’t think music is getting dumbed down, just that different aspects are becoming more prioritized than others were in the past.
Listen to a 100 gecs or other hyperpop song and listen to some of rhythmic motifs being used. This isn’t a fringe genre either, it’s hugely popular with gen z. It may not have key changes like a rock ballad, but it has lots of musical ideas which songwriters from the last 60 years never even had access to.
My theory is that when European classical music was being written, there were no loudspeakers, amplifiers, effects or digital instruments. To fill whole auditable frequency spectrum multiple instruments were needed to play multiple pitches at once.
Reason for this is that most instruments could only fill part of the spectrum. Organ being one notable exception. Still, even on organ, to fill the whole spectrum, multiple notes need to be played at the same time. So, harmony was very important to produce a full sound.
Today, a single synth can fill the whole frequency spectrum by playing just one note. So, to have a full sound, harmonies aren't necessary anymore.
Yes, except that I think people relate to voices differently than other instruments; maybe our brains lock onto human voices in a special way. So harmonies that are sung still have a different effect.
> Elaborate harmonies are just not a thing anymore.
I think that's a niaive analysis of a lot of popular music. If I listen to Justin Beiber or Sam Fender or Taylor Swift, their songs often contain very rich harmony, not necessarily (but definitely including) vocal harmonies but across instrumentation, deviation from the 4-chord song and even a lot of mixing of influences in, what I have to say, are some very unique and refreshing ways that I have either not heard before or certainly not in the mainstream.
I think most people just have getting old syndrome. The stuff I listened to when I was in my formative years was great and everything since then not so much.
I'm personally very pleased with the quality of new music without having to like all of it.
I listen to a lot of music across a lot of eras, and I'm not particularly fond of the 70s or early 80s (my era). I agree that "in my day" is a thing, but the criticism is accurate anyway.
I think vocal harmonies affect people differently for the same reasons people find vocals so compelling: we have wetware devoted to the human voice. It isn't just another instrument, perceptually, at least for most people.
> My hypothesis is that you can choose any aspect of composition that musicians find exciting and note the same decline over time.
Even within the pop world, contemporary percussion/drumming is often significantly more complex than in the past (and outside the pop world, almost always).
Some musicians also find timbre rather exciting, and the possibilities (and usage) here have also expanded significantly over the last 60 years.
it's worth noting that there are many more timbral manipulations now available. effects such as a filter can serve a similar purpose to a key change and can even be modulated as instruments in their own right. modern producers have many more options.
This isn't an accurate title since it only talks about a tiny subset of genres available and specifically concentrates on popular (hence historically simple) songs
With that in mind, it’s probably not a coincidence that the only number one hit to use a key change during the 2010s is also one of the most iconic: Travis Scott’s “SICKO MODE.”
That can't be true, surely? Only one number one song with a key change in a whole decade? (I assume we're talking US charts?)
Crazy by Gnarls Barkely has some nice key changes but it only got to number 2 apparently.
No, and no. It's not that you can't write multi-key music (polytonal is one word for that) but it sounds esoteric, "modern", "difficult", and not something you're going to use in a chart hit.
There are probably one or two examples somewhere, but it's certainly not common.
Keys are like the rails that keep a train on the tracks. If you don't have them, or if they're too non-linear, you lose a sense of momentum that keeps untrained people listening.
Classical music meanders for a while and then stops at cadences, which reinforce the key. It's like a train ride with stations. A key change switches the ride to a different track, but you always get a series of pauses and restarts.
Modern music uses ambiguous chord sequences - usually four chords - that repeat over and over but never come to a climax or a pause. The chords are ambiguous because they fit with a couple of keys - usually related major and minor, or perhaps a mode - but without the stops there's no clear sense which applies.
So you get continuous but repetitive motion on a single track without the stops. It's like being stuck on a loop and going through the same station over and over without stopping.
Sometimes the scenery changes between the verse and the chorus/drop/whatever. But without the clear key stops you can't get off.
Modern music uses ambiguous chord sequences - usually four chords - that repeat over and over but never come to a climax or a pause. The chords are ambiguous because they fit with a couple of keys - usually related major and minor, or perhaps a mode - but without the stops there's no clear sense which applies.
I don't agree with that.
A key is not just a collection of allowed notes, there is a kindof frequency distribution to them too, so that the tonic is either the most used or the most implied. The fifth is often the second-most-used. Its sortof like a key has a 'center of gravity' in the tonic note. Either it will be used a lot or alluded to a lot.
So a chord sequence might technically fit into different keys but usually there is an implied tonic and that 'tells' you what key you are in.
So within a (well constructed) chord sequence in modern pop you can still have suspense and resolutions and so on. Kindof the same as cadence but done in a different way.
And the trick to a good key change is to subtely shift the 'weight' in the direction of the new key just before you make the change.
I don't think this is particularly true, a lot of pop music is very hard to pin to a single key if you analyze it strictly through the lens of western art music theory. You end up having to say weird stuff like "well the song is in one key but the chorus is in another, but with the third borrowed from the first key, but that note is left out of the final chorus..." when "it just has two roots" is a complete explanation.
It's not even "modern," people still sit around arguing about which key certain beatles songs are in, when again "more than one" is a more useful explanation.
And I mean I know you know this but for other readers: music theory isn't like a math formula where song goes in, answers come out. It's a practical framework and a vocabulary for communicating about music, and evaluation of a successful analysis has to be based on the usefulness of the evaluation. There can be multiple "correct" analyses of the same piece of music, with different usefulness to different people at different times.
Pop music has influences from outside the mainstream european music traditions, and so certain assumptions that almost always make sense within those traditions (eg songs have a key, with a tonic) will lead you to goofy places sometimes.
Key is described as choosing a certain set of notes from all the available ones.
A key is not just a collection of allowed notes, there is a kindof frequency distribution to them too, so that the tonic is either the most used or the most implied. The fifth is often the second-most-used. Its sortof like a key has a 'center of gravity' in the tonic note. Either it will be used a lot or alluded to a lot by the other notes.
Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
Sortof - the notes might technically be part of a few different keys - but usually there is an 'implied center of gravity' pointing to a tonic note and that tells you what key you are actually in. But if you make it ambiguous for a few bars it can be a useful musical effect, sorotf suspense. And then you resolve to one or the other possible candidates and it sounds cool. But if you do it for too long it sounds muddy.
A good key change is sortof like that, you hover in a space that could be either key for a bit then resolve to something specific.
Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
Jazz goes all over the place. Accidentals, key changes. An accidental is like a single note that isn't 'in' the key. Perhaps like a one note key change. The keys are still part of it but its more adventurous.
If you completely ignore key altogether its polytonal and it sounds kindof annoying.
Althought there's a big argument as to whether western keys are all just conditioning or something intrinsic. e.g. Does Major sound 'happy' and Minor sound 'sad' to all humans? Octaves are pretty universal in human music but after that it gets complicated. I think there's some good pointers to how overtones in in inner ear correspond to frequency ratios which correspond to classic intervals such as the third or fifth. And then how best to construct a scale that squeezes in the most useful thirds and fifths and so on. If you follow that exercise then the white keys/black keys on a piano start to look quite optimal. BUT social conditioning, anthropology and so on so maybe not.
A melody or a chord sequence sets up an expectation. How you meet that expectation (directly, or shades of 'slightly' to 'completely subverted') is where the art happens. You can imply the tonic note without having to actually go there sometimes.
It's all patterns, and getting the balance between repetition and change.
> Key is described as choosing a certain set of notes from all the available ones.
Not exactly, take for example the Cmaj scale. You can write different melodies that "gravitate" around one of the 7 notes and that effect makes up for a particular mode of the scale of C.
Even if the notes are exactly the same you can easily hear the different flavor of each mode.
The easiest way to hear the modes is to play continuously the Cmaj scale against a C drone (a long note), but each time starting from a different grade of the scale of Cmaj. Same notes, different feelings. It's unclear to me (and I think controversial even among musicians) if you should use the mode name as a qualifier for the key and usually people just say that a song is in the key of $note, but you can definitely hear the difference. In particular, it is (was?) common to modulate to the relative minor/major key to highlight a section of a song (e.g.: key changes from Cmaj to Amin, same notes).
> Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
It's very common in jazz, a classic example: Giant steps by Coltrane. The song continuously modulates in major thirds and loops around three keys.
> Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
Check out "Entrance of the Gladiators" (ie, the stereotypical circus song.)
It uses all the notes on the chromatic scale, so it doesn't "fit" into a specific key. (But it's still considered to be in a specific key. The notes outside that key are the exception not the rule.)
I mean, key changes may not be popular right now, but things have a way of coming back around. Sooner or later, someone is going to make a really good song with a key change and then it's going to be back in rotation.
That's not necessarily true.... Swelling vibrato-heavy string backing on choruses were a staple for decades, have been gone for just as long, and are probably never coming back thank god.
I'd take that bet. I'd bet you that backing by full-blooded, real bowed strings, with plummy vibrato and all, will come back in style at some point in the next thirty years.
To be fair, later can be very later. On the order of decades even.
And maybe it just winds up with a dedicated niche audience. Never fully mainstream, but never out of the current culture either. It's hard to predict what people will like in the future. The best we can do is just do things we like.
I normally think the up-a-semitone key change is kinda trite, with the exception of The Rainbow Connection from The Muppets. Changes key in a non-obvious way after the middle-8 and really gives the song a lift
(FWIW I write songs with key changes all the time (usually tonic->dominant). If only someone would listen to them ...)
Interesting observation about “horizontal” vs “vertical” songwriting, driven by technology.
Can relate to that.
On guitar, what I come up with will more likely be a progression — which then gets layered (horizontal first). On Ableton, it usually starts with layering a loop before I build it over time (vertical first).
The first point about the rise of hip hop seems good. The second point about the rise of digital production seems like incorrect conjecture.
If chord changes had become more, not less popular, I'm sure that the rise of digital production would be cited as the reason, since it makes it much easier to modulate all the instruments.
I think a better hypothesis is what was alluded to in the editorial at the end:
> Say what you will about key changes. Maybe you find them at best heavy-handed and at worst trite. I know that I often do.
They have just fallen out of fashion as being gimmicky.
I don't really buy that vertical production would kill the key change. After all, beat switches are alive and well. We still have verses and choruses and interludes and beat drops.
The last-chorus step up in key has been called the "Truck Driver's Gear Shift" and widely mocked as a cheap way to add energy to a song that is flagging, reaching its end, and needs to go out with a bang. Musicians started attempting to end their music on its own terms rather than resort to a gimmick in response.
Yes, key changes went away in US pop music at some point a few decades ago.
But the idea that this has to do either with hip-hop or with digital music production is frankly ludicrous, and the author presents zero causal evidence here except that all three things happened very roughly around the same time. And the proposed explanations make zero sense.
The real answer is simply that the shifting the key up in a dramatic energy-raising fashion just went out of style, like a thousand other things in music. As the author themself notes, they're "heavy-handed" and "trite". I could add corny, old-fashioned, and overly earnest to that list.
Everything in music gets overdone and then fades away to make room for the next new thing. There's no more reason needed for this than people just got tired of the old thing -- which they always will.
Claiming it's because of hip-hop or digital music is just strange.
I don't think it's just a fashion thing. There is a real outcome of this: the music is simpler and less interesting. Modulation isn't the only missing ingredient, though. Quantization and click tracks and pitch-correction and sampling have all combined to reduce the variation in songs.
Part of it is driven by the need to make production cheaper (since music is less profitable now), so it's hard to say if it will come back.
Pitch correction is harder to do live, if there are key changes, since you can set your auto tuner to a specific key
Also, key changes present some increased difficulty (not insurmountable of course) in live performance on certain instruments like guitars. And the fact is (at least frontman) music artists are getting less talented at their instruments on average
Having never performed live I'm just guessing, but theoretically changing keys on autotune should be as simple as pressing a single button at the correct point in the song, no? Conceivably it could even be programmed in with everything else
Yes it is programmed for, e.g. Taylor Swift shows. For us regular guys there's a separate autotune box for each voice and it's sometimes not as simple as pressing one button.
If you listen to top 40 only, then maybe. (Although a lot of top-40 music back in the 70's was pretty bad too. We only continue to listen to the cream of the crop from back then, not the average radio station song.)
But if you're listening to top 40 music these days, well that's your fault. Outside of it, there's never been more complexity and variety and interest and genre-mixing in the history of music than today. You're not stuck with the radio, you've got Spotify and the stuff you can find outside of the mainstream is amazing.
I don't think it's that strange. Perhaps calling out those two in particular might seem a little vindictive but I'd say modern music in general.
Modern music is watered down and simple. The drums are all 4x4, the chords are all the same, the progressions are predictable, etc. I'm not talking about just a genre using a particular set of chords, I am talking about literally being able to predict the next note using only 10 seconds of audio. Moreover, there is so much tooling around making absolutely talentless hacks sound good (auto-tune, quantization, very clever filtering) it's hard to actually know if someone is even real sometimes.
More than ever I've also noticed modern music videos are simply advertisements for luxury brands. I just think the new generation lacks the sophistication to enjoy good music. Every generation since the invention of arguably the highest most supreme form of musical arrangement, orchestral arrangement, has resulted in slowly stripping away any sort of intellectual endeavor listening music had held. There's a reason classic rock is called classic rock and stuff made in the 90s onward doesn't qualify. It was probably the last period of time where music actually required talent rather than a ghost writer and an advertising deal. This isn't just my age speaking. I suspect in 50 years people will still remember Zeppelin, but no one will remember Jay-Z.
> There's a reason classic rock is called classic rock and stuff made in the 90s onward doesn't qualify.
Of course rock made in the 1990s is classic rock now. That's how it works: Music made when the target demographic was in its teens and young adulthood is classic, and the music from the era when the currently dying generation was young gets aged out. When was the last time you heard Dion and the Belmonts on terrestrial radio? How about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers? That's music. That's how all this works. Soon enough, Jay-Z will be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, if Jelly Roll Morton (look him up, kiddo) can make it, they obviously abandoned the "Rock and Roll" part of their name long ago.
Tbh I think we look at older music with rose colored cglasses cause only the best of the best pop music survives. Pop music has always and will always be simple and shitty by and large.
However, in modern times, the barrier to entry of record an album is virtually 0. You can make a masterpiece in your bedroom if you want to. There is SO much interesting music happening right now I really resent this idea that music has somehow lost its way.
Examples : king gizzard and the lizard wizard, the dillinger escape plan, bjork, death grips, tim hecker, danny brown, etc etc the list is damn near infinite. Lots of incredible, boundary pushing music has happened in the last 15 or so years, and continues on a daily basis
Just from your list I only am aware of Bjork and Death Grips. Bjork is interesting but I would consider death grips the greatest troll on the planet. You could make an album of a man screaming over banging pots and pans and achieve the same level of avant garde notoriety he has. It's not good in the same sense post-modernist art is not good. It's meaningless noise searching for meaning.
Anyway I keep getting downvoted for this which is hilarious. It's obvious people have virtually no idea what musical talent sounds like. Talent is not what you like, it's legitimate hard earned skill. Sampled trash and top 40s 4x4 beats augmented by auto-tune and filters is not skill no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig. Neither is shouting into a microphone behind overdriven noise-music. Being avant garde also doesn't imply skill, the relationship is not a bijection.
Death Grips is legitimately good, as in, I bob my head and sing along to it, and it gives me goosebumps because its awesome. Also, there is absolutely 0% chance you could create something that comes close to their music. Their keyboard player is an insanely talented producer and their samples are masterfully collected and utilized.
So honestly sounds to me like you are just closed minded and pretentious.
A lack of rhythmic variation. Consider the folk tradition of wandering from the time signature; Pete Seeger and early Paul Simon for instance. And the Beatles, certainly
Generally a lack of pickup notes, or "anacrusis".
And the lack of an inspirational melody or chord change.
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60's pop music was, I think, a special case because the hit songs had to get noticed and appreciated in a worst-case listening environment; typically a crappy AM radio.
Also, key changes are actually pretty common in hip hop. Its a really really common technique to shift everything down a half step at some point in the song or to do a tape slowdown effect which pitches everything down. Not technically a "key change" but effectively the same thing.
Yes, those 'lifting' key changes in MJ's songs may seem gratuitous, but key changes were used more subtlety by, for instance, Beatles to enrich the music with expressiveness even at the expense of musical common sense. And if anything, pop music today is just too uniform.
I don't think you can separate music, or any art form for that matter, from the artist's craft, skill, expressiveness, resources, and materials.
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Digital isn't inherently bad, but...
If the ENTIRETY of your music production is done on a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) app, with its available tools and plugins, that's gonna have an effect.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
If today's music producers used the DAW only for recording, and stayed away for composing, arranging, and becoming proficient at playing instruments, things would be much better.
Sure using a DAW has an effect, mainly in providing more tools, but the idea that one of its effects is no more key changes makes... just utterly no sense. DAW's handle key changes just fine, they don't do a single thing to make them more difficult or lead you to forget about them.
It makes as much sense as saying the popularity of young-adult novels is due to authors using word processors instead of writing by hand. The two have nothing to do with each other.
"More tools" is not necessarily a good thing. Music, as any art form, thrives on limitations. And without complaint.
"The Blues" is a very limited form, yet it has provided about a century of wonderful creative music.
If I'm writing a string quartet, I don't complain that a particular note can't be sung by a gospel choir instead of a cello. Just as a painter doesn't complain about the canvas being 2 dimensional.
Of course DAW's can handle key changes.
The issue is that working full time in a DAW environment seems to have a tendency to displace a number of important musical sensibilities.
BUT most of the musical operations we see in the digital world are not "new possibilities", but rather cheap imitations of previous work. Samples, drum machines, simulations, emulations, modeling, etc.
And especially the separation of the musician playing the instrument from the sound making mechanism. That's a biggie. It's a kind of alienation, and that's going to have a dramatic negative effect.
And this is consistent with the original complaint about modern pop music not being very good. Sure, the key change might not be the best example, but the point still stands. If there are so many new possibilities, why does the music suck?
The formatting of that article is a bit hard to read.
People have been pointing out how little modulation there is in modern pop music for a while. Combined with click-tracks, pitch-correction and sampling, there is just less variation in most modern pop songs.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 66.4 ms ] threadWhat’s priceless is having the opportunity to think something through and explain it and Tedium rises above the shitposting world. Bravo!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's particularly extremely important when the thread is fresh, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Tossing flamebait in like this risks ruining the entire thing.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/08/2...
It feels almost as if the answer is "they are a component of the whole, but not musicians by themselves". i.e. the beat can't be music by itself, but the vocals for example, can.
I don't fully believe that though, and am leaning more towards a beat being able to be music by itself too. You can see my dilemma though :P
Or, I just spent a while whistling a long to take the a train at the end of https://youtu.be/crZ8ALG3tm4
.. just think about it with an open mind, or try to even defend that drummers are musicians. I think most definitions of musicians don't include drummers much more than the costume designers or the publishers. (They work in the music industry, make music better, but can't and don't create music themselves alone.) I lean towards that they are not musicians.
Also if GGGP doesn't classify hiphop or rap as music, then the "but the drummers are usually classified as musicians too" argument doesn't work on many levels.
What's harder to decide, IMO, is whether a drum solo really constitutes "music".
If rap isn't music, then is a drum solo also not music?
Personally, I can't stand most rap, but I also get bored with drum solos and usually skip them, even if I otherwise really love the drum parts of the band's other songs.
That is not hard to decide. Of course a drum solo is music.
Rap is almost all rhythm, almost no harmony or melody. Drums are all rhythm, no harmony or melody. How the hell is that "reactionary"? It's just a basic fact.
regardless it's no fact, even the rapper very frequently uses melodic elements. you seem ignorant of it and have no ear for it.
I would be very interested to see any published definition of “musician” or “music” in a dictionary that would exclude drums.
The comparison of drummers to costume designers and publishers is so weak that I find it hard to believe you actually think this.
I am also glad that you brought the conversation back to rap. My original analogy of rap to drumming wasn’t very good, because a huge majority of rap music does have melody, harmony, form, and rhythm, no different than any other genre of music.
For reference, this is at the top of the charts today: https://youtu.be/I4DjHHVHWAE
Just try getting a computer to play the notes of some of your favourite tunes with equal - or, better, random - duration and weighting if you want to be convinced of that. Also observe that music without melody can be found everywhere, from rap to Steve Reich to the Kodo Drummers, but to exclude rhythm relegates you to the really out there stuff like 4'33" (complete silence) or music composed of randomly timed or continuously varying sounds.
We have perfectly good terms to distinguish between rhythm and melody such as, you know, "rhythm" and "melody". Your instinctive desire to define "music" so as to somehow exclude rhythm is simply wrong.
Steve Reich would dispute this, with gusto. You can only possibly make the claim that he ever composed non-melodic sound in his earliest years (e.g. "Come Out"), but even then he was fascinated by the implicit melodic signatures of otherwise non-melodic music (realized later in a piece like Different Trains, where he explicitly has instruments play the melody of spoken words).
analogue - the thing which is compared
analogy - the act of comparing
in this case you'd use "analogy", as in "this is an excellent analogy ..."
the analogue is the musical characteristics of the drums, in reference to musical styles, moving from style to instruments by, well, analogy.
Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A: A drummer.
Maybe “music you like” and “music you dont like”?
It is totally fine to not like certain genres of music. But it is pretty dumb to say “I don’t like this book, therefore it is not a book”.
Sorry - Cant get to link but there's a canadian musician on yt that plays guitar solos for quite some time over the same looped backing tracks. Lovely stuff.
The difficult part is finding a nice change and the right chords and notes to work as a bridge. Also if sung, not getting out of range.
Neither of the lists was based on sales by the way, since the state media monopoly was supposedly non-commercial.
Anyway the Sweden top 20 stuff stayed dance-based (think jitterbug, not rave). Somewhere someone started talking about the key change. Even non-musichians learned to hear and point out the key change (easy, almost always the last refrain). Sweden top 20 leaned in to it. More humor oriented songs now include the key change in the lyrics ("here comes the pull-up).
Key changes are so common in Eurovision songs that it is mentioned in the ultimate Eurovision spoof song "Love Love Peace Peace", which also features at least one key change: https://youtu.be/Cv6tgnx6jTQ
The reports of the death of the key change, dare I say, are greatly exaggerated.
Eurovision is hugely popular and continuously and commercially successful outside of the charts world.
In Swedish, this key change is generally called a "schlagerhöjning", where "schlager" [2] is the broad genre word for the type of songs that compete in the Eurovision. The term is old, obviously there's a rather wide genre spread these days but it used to be more same-same.
Edit: added a "Swedish" above, I did not realize that the chart only lists Swedish music, saw another comment mention this. Very weird of me.
[1]: https://sverigesradio.se/topplista.aspx?programid=2023&date=...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlager_music
Also there are local musicians popular in each country. And there are musicians from countries other than the US that are international but unknown in the US.
Anyway, Eurovision is quite irrelevant in Europe too :)
Edit... for native English speakers, consider this: there're songs in which the lyrics are more important than music. That kind of music is usually boring if you can't understand what they're saying.
Look at the Billboard (or equivalent) charts for Germany, France, Argentina, or any other non-Anglo country; maybe 10% of the entries are English language or from American artists.
Historically I would say that to be an accurate statement. It used to be a Eurovision-staple.
The latest few years though, I’ve been surprised that literally none of the songs making it to the finals have key-changes like this any more.
When it’s usage is decimated, even in Eurovision-songs, I think that clearly shows the author has a solid point.
But key changes are not popular in popular (sic) songs. Very few EuroVision songs transition to the radio/....
You can easily tell which songs were mostly influenced by a singer (made for them) or by a producer (made for plays/profit). Stuff which is popular with singer, elaborate vocal constructions don't typically make for a good song.
Which is why you need a producer to say NO to the singer if you want a popular song. Of course, the singer can be the producer, but it's a different skill set.
In Eurovision though, the cheese is part of the fun.
But it isn't just key changes that have gone away. We used to let drummers speed up and slow down with the emotion of the song. Now we want everything on a grid for ease of production, we pitch-correct even when it isn't really needed, we sample sounds rather than have real musicians play. The result of all that is that songs have a narrower envelope of variation, and they tend to be more simplistic.
Though with traditional vinyl the pitch can shift as one record is sped up or slowed down to match the tempo of another. It can be challenging to simultaneously match both the tempo and tuning of two vinyl records.
As noted in the article, grid-based tools do seem to be designed to facilitate loop-based production. But Logic is also frequently used for soundtracks and certainly supports key and tempo changes. Moreover the chromatic piano grid used in many DAWs and sequencers seems more key agnostic than a staff with a key signature. Not only that, but some DAWs (Ableton Live for example) are very good at processing samples so that their rhythm and tuning can easily be adjusted.
Also, as a bass player. I don’t care. I mean, I’ll whine if you go to Gb, but it’s mostly just for form. Any awkwardness in fitting low lines on the instrument is more than made up by telling a guitar player to play the Cb chord.
Some songs did them in a way that was predictable, just following the formula of others, but some did them really well.
One stand-out example, to me, is how Seal closes the song “People Asking Why” (around the 3:16 mark):
https://youtu.be/qq_bfcvdN-0
With his vocal range, he was one of the few that could pull something like that off.
You can especially note that when it comes to harmonies, and harmonic shifts (aka key changes) are not the only aspect that has been greatly simplified. Elaborate harmonies are just not a thing anymore.
And that's not just the typical effect that old generations cannot relate as much to the music of new generations. No, it's that today's taste - which, of course, has been mostly shaped by the exposure to today's music - appreciates songs that are, from a musician's perspective, much simpler in almost every aspect. The only exception that I can think of is that the performance capabilities of the singer have been put much more in the focus, so you can find songs today that are really difficult to sing well. This is mostly true for female performers, though, and the beginnings of that trend can probably be traced back to Whitney Houston and especially Mariah Carey, who made a certain Coloratura-style of singing fashionable.
I think hardly anyone will dispute the observation that today's music business is much more professionalized than it had already been since the beginning of recording technology. And that goes to tell. It really _is_ a business, and the process of producing a hit song has been streamlined tremendously.
Of course, we need to keep in mind that the focus of the article (as well as my comment) is on chart pop music. And of course, this is a big-picture kind of observation, not claiming that you couldn't cite some (however, rare) exceptions here and there. A thriving alternative scene with much more elaborate song writing has never ceased to exist, but that's not what gets played on your average top-40 radio station (for the youngens: "streams").
For example the article mention more different keys are used today.
Key changes used to be something most bands handled easily, and the best songwriters got a lot of mileage out of it.
As everybody has a more individual selection of music, due to easy and cheap access to almost all published music ever, the common denominator becomes smaller.
I don’t think music is becoming dumber overall.
People have been saying that as long as popular music have existed. Jazz was considered dumb and unsophisticated, crooners were considered dumb and unsophisticated, rock music was considered dumb and unsophisticated.
Each of these genres just discard previous measures of sophistication and introduce their own. The article have an interesting observation about "vertical" vs "horizontal" songwriting. Newer music is just different.
Kendrick Lamar is not dumbed down compared to Bon Jovi just because he doesn't change the key before that last chorus.
"Lute players spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune"
If you look at the demographics of top 40 listeners today compared to forty years ago, the popularity of the hits are more narrowly confined to teens and young adults, particularly in the working class US and in developing Latin American countries. You can also look at the ethos of the top genres, such as rap and country, which are less broadly appealing than popular genres of the past such as rock, R&B, or even jazz.
This is driven by economics. Young people have more free time than adults, and they have greater access to music than they did in the pre-Internet age. So unless we think young music streamers have comparable taste to music-buying adults of the past, it seems likely that dumbing down to a certain point to meet the audience's expectations is more profitable than the alternative.
I didn't know that. Can you point me to the source of these numbers? I would like to know more.
> If you look at the demographics of top 40 listeners today compared to forty years ago, the popularity of the hits are more narrowly confined to teens and young adults
So how do I look at these demographics and confirm this claim?
There are always competing forces pulling music towards simplicity and complexity. Whenever the complexity is squashed in one place it comes back in another.
The biggest change over the last decade or so has been increasingly ornate production. In the 80s mixes were semi-automated, but you couldn't do much except change levels. Now you can automate everything - levels, EQ, EQ type, effects, effect parameters - with extreme precision and accuracy.
So most modern mixes have constant subtle changes. They don't leap out like a key change, but (for example) the vocal tone and the effects on the vocal will often change phrase by phrase. Or even word by word.
Listen to a 100 gecs or other hyperpop song and listen to some of rhythmic motifs being used. This isn’t a fringe genre either, it’s hugely popular with gen z. It may not have key changes like a rock ballad, but it has lots of musical ideas which songwriters from the last 60 years never even had access to.
I think one way to categorize music is harmony focused (European classical music) or rhythm focused (African tribal music).
In the last 30 years we've seen a big shift towards more rhythm based music, especially in electronic music.
I don't think it's just a fad, I think it's deeper, rhythm can put the brain in a trance like state, this is harder to do with harmonies.
Reason for this is that most instruments could only fill part of the spectrum. Organ being one notable exception. Still, even on organ, to fill the whole spectrum, multiple notes need to be played at the same time. So, harmony was very important to produce a full sound.
Today, a single synth can fill the whole frequency spectrum by playing just one note. So, to have a full sound, harmonies aren't necessary anymore.
I think that's a niaive analysis of a lot of popular music. If I listen to Justin Beiber or Sam Fender or Taylor Swift, their songs often contain very rich harmony, not necessarily (but definitely including) vocal harmonies but across instrumentation, deviation from the 4-chord song and even a lot of mixing of influences in, what I have to say, are some very unique and refreshing ways that I have either not heard before or certainly not in the mainstream.
I think most people just have getting old syndrome. The stuff I listened to when I was in my formative years was great and everything since then not so much.
I'm personally very pleased with the quality of new music without having to like all of it.
I think vocal harmonies affect people differently for the same reasons people find vocals so compelling: we have wetware devoted to the human voice. It isn't just another instrument, perceptually, at least for most people.
Even within the pop world, contemporary percussion/drumming is often significantly more complex than in the past (and outside the pop world, almost always).
Some musicians also find timbre rather exciting, and the possibilities (and usage) here have also expanded significantly over the last 60 years.
That can't be true, surely? Only one number one song with a key change in a whole decade? (I assume we're talking US charts?)
Crazy by Gnarls Barkely has some nice key changes but it only got to number 2 apparently.
Starts and ends in the same key. There's some minor<->major mode shifting over the course of the song, but the tonic remains the same.
https://flypaper.soundfly.com/produce/the-flurry-of-harmonic...
(btw whoever invented the name "parallel key" for majors and minors with the same tonic did a terrible job)
Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
There are probably one or two examples somewhere, but it's certainly not common.
Keys are like the rails that keep a train on the tracks. If you don't have them, or if they're too non-linear, you lose a sense of momentum that keeps untrained people listening.
Classical music meanders for a while and then stops at cadences, which reinforce the key. It's like a train ride with stations. A key change switches the ride to a different track, but you always get a series of pauses and restarts.
Modern music uses ambiguous chord sequences - usually four chords - that repeat over and over but never come to a climax or a pause. The chords are ambiguous because they fit with a couple of keys - usually related major and minor, or perhaps a mode - but without the stops there's no clear sense which applies.
So you get continuous but repetitive motion on a single track without the stops. It's like being stuck on a loop and going through the same station over and over without stopping.
Sometimes the scenery changes between the verse and the chorus/drop/whatever. But without the clear key stops you can't get off.
I don't agree with that.
A key is not just a collection of allowed notes, there is a kindof frequency distribution to them too, so that the tonic is either the most used or the most implied. The fifth is often the second-most-used. Its sortof like a key has a 'center of gravity' in the tonic note. Either it will be used a lot or alluded to a lot.
So a chord sequence might technically fit into different keys but usually there is an implied tonic and that 'tells' you what key you are in.
So within a (well constructed) chord sequence in modern pop you can still have suspense and resolutions and so on. Kindof the same as cadence but done in a different way.
And the trick to a good key change is to subtely shift the 'weight' in the direction of the new key just before you make the change.
It's not even "modern," people still sit around arguing about which key certain beatles songs are in, when again "more than one" is a more useful explanation.
And I mean I know you know this but for other readers: music theory isn't like a math formula where song goes in, answers come out. It's a practical framework and a vocabulary for communicating about music, and evaluation of a successful analysis has to be based on the usefulness of the evaluation. There can be multiple "correct" analyses of the same piece of music, with different usefulness to different people at different times.
Pop music has influences from outside the mainstream european music traditions, and so certain assumptions that almost always make sense within those traditions (eg songs have a key, with a tonic) will lead you to goofy places sometimes.
A key is not just a collection of allowed notes, there is a kindof frequency distribution to them too, so that the tonic is either the most used or the most implied. The fifth is often the second-most-used. Its sortof like a key has a 'center of gravity' in the tonic note. Either it will be used a lot or alluded to a lot by the other notes.
Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
Sortof - the notes might technically be part of a few different keys - but usually there is an 'implied center of gravity' pointing to a tonic note and that tells you what key you are actually in. But if you make it ambiguous for a few bars it can be a useful musical effect, sorotf suspense. And then you resolve to one or the other possible candidates and it sounds cool. But if you do it for too long it sounds muddy.
A good key change is sortof like that, you hover in a space that could be either key for a bit then resolve to something specific.
Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
Jazz goes all over the place. Accidentals, key changes. An accidental is like a single note that isn't 'in' the key. Perhaps like a one note key change. The keys are still part of it but its more adventurous.
If you completely ignore key altogether its polytonal and it sounds kindof annoying.
Or people invent their own ones, e.g. Aleksi Perälä and the Colundi Sequence https://thequietus.com/articles/20493-aleksi-perl-perala-col...
Althought there's a big argument as to whether western keys are all just conditioning or something intrinsic. e.g. Does Major sound 'happy' and Minor sound 'sad' to all humans? Octaves are pretty universal in human music but after that it gets complicated. I think there's some good pointers to how overtones in in inner ear correspond to frequency ratios which correspond to classic intervals such as the third or fifth. And then how best to construct a scale that squeezes in the most useful thirds and fifths and so on. If you follow that exercise then the white keys/black keys on a piano start to look quite optimal. BUT social conditioning, anthropology and so on so maybe not.
It's all patterns, and getting the balance between repetition and change.
Not exactly, take for example the Cmaj scale. You can write different melodies that "gravitate" around one of the 7 notes and that effect makes up for a particular mode of the scale of C. Even if the notes are exactly the same you can easily hear the different flavor of each mode.
The easiest way to hear the modes is to play continuously the Cmaj scale against a C drone (a long note), but each time starting from a different grade of the scale of Cmaj. Same notes, different feelings. It's unclear to me (and I think controversial even among musicians) if you should use the mode name as a qualifier for the key and usually people just say that a song is in the key of $note, but you can definitely hear the difference. In particular, it is (was?) common to modulate to the relative minor/major key to highlight a section of a song (e.g.: key changes from Cmaj to Amin, same notes).
> Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
It's very common in jazz, a classic example: Giant steps by Coltrane. The song continuously modulates in major thirds and loops around three keys.
> Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
Look up "serialism" and "atonal music".
It uses all the notes on the chromatic scale, so it doesn't "fit" into a specific key. (But it's still considered to be in a specific key. The notes outside that key are the exception not the rule.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLxIB_lrwk0
And maybe it just winds up with a dedicated niche audience. Never fully mainstream, but never out of the current culture either. It's hard to predict what people will like in the future. The best we can do is just do things we like.
(FWIW I write songs with key changes all the time (usually tonic->dominant). If only someone would listen to them ...)
Can relate to that.
On guitar, what I come up with will more likely be a progression — which then gets layered (horizontal first). On Ableton, it usually starts with layering a loop before I build it over time (vertical first).
If chord changes had become more, not less popular, I'm sure that the rise of digital production would be cited as the reason, since it makes it much easier to modulate all the instruments.
I think a better hypothesis is what was alluded to in the editorial at the end:
> Say what you will about key changes. Maybe you find them at best heavy-handed and at worst trite. I know that I often do.
They have just fallen out of fashion as being gimmicky.
I don't really buy that vertical production would kill the key change. After all, beat switches are alive and well. We still have verses and choruses and interludes and beat drops.
I feel personally attacked whenever I want to learn a song, and it has a key change in the middle of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8
That song makes everything else look like amateur hour. Somehow it hit #4 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1983.
I think I'll stick to bluegrass. In G.
Yes, key changes went away in US pop music at some point a few decades ago.
But the idea that this has to do either with hip-hop or with digital music production is frankly ludicrous, and the author presents zero causal evidence here except that all three things happened very roughly around the same time. And the proposed explanations make zero sense.
The real answer is simply that the shifting the key up in a dramatic energy-raising fashion just went out of style, like a thousand other things in music. As the author themself notes, they're "heavy-handed" and "trite". I could add corny, old-fashioned, and overly earnest to that list.
Everything in music gets overdone and then fades away to make room for the next new thing. There's no more reason needed for this than people just got tired of the old thing -- which they always will.
Claiming it's because of hip-hop or digital music is just strange.
Part of it is driven by the need to make production cheaper (since music is less profitable now), so it's hard to say if it will come back.
Also, key changes present some increased difficulty (not insurmountable of course) in live performance on certain instruments like guitars. And the fact is (at least frontman) music artists are getting less talented at their instruments on average
If you listen to top 40 only, then maybe. (Although a lot of top-40 music back in the 70's was pretty bad too. We only continue to listen to the cream of the crop from back then, not the average radio station song.)
But if you're listening to top 40 music these days, well that's your fault. Outside of it, there's never been more complexity and variety and interest and genre-mixing in the history of music than today. You're not stuck with the radio, you've got Spotify and the stuff you can find outside of the mainstream is amazing.
Modern music is watered down and simple. The drums are all 4x4, the chords are all the same, the progressions are predictable, etc. I'm not talking about just a genre using a particular set of chords, I am talking about literally being able to predict the next note using only 10 seconds of audio. Moreover, there is so much tooling around making absolutely talentless hacks sound good (auto-tune, quantization, very clever filtering) it's hard to actually know if someone is even real sometimes.
More than ever I've also noticed modern music videos are simply advertisements for luxury brands. I just think the new generation lacks the sophistication to enjoy good music. Every generation since the invention of arguably the highest most supreme form of musical arrangement, orchestral arrangement, has resulted in slowly stripping away any sort of intellectual endeavor listening music had held. There's a reason classic rock is called classic rock and stuff made in the 90s onward doesn't qualify. It was probably the last period of time where music actually required talent rather than a ghost writer and an advertising deal. This isn't just my age speaking. I suspect in 50 years people will still remember Zeppelin, but no one will remember Jay-Z.
Of course rock made in the 1990s is classic rock now. That's how it works: Music made when the target demographic was in its teens and young adulthood is classic, and the music from the era when the currently dying generation was young gets aged out. When was the last time you heard Dion and the Belmonts on terrestrial radio? How about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers? That's music. That's how all this works. Soon enough, Jay-Z will be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, if Jelly Roll Morton (look him up, kiddo) can make it, they obviously abandoned the "Rock and Roll" part of their name long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rock_and_Roll_Hall_of_...
Jay-Z, on the other hand, is in the main category.
However, in modern times, the barrier to entry of record an album is virtually 0. You can make a masterpiece in your bedroom if you want to. There is SO much interesting music happening right now I really resent this idea that music has somehow lost its way.
Examples : king gizzard and the lizard wizard, the dillinger escape plan, bjork, death grips, tim hecker, danny brown, etc etc the list is damn near infinite. Lots of incredible, boundary pushing music has happened in the last 15 or so years, and continues on a daily basis
Anyway I keep getting downvoted for this which is hilarious. It's obvious people have virtually no idea what musical talent sounds like. Talent is not what you like, it's legitimate hard earned skill. Sampled trash and top 40s 4x4 beats augmented by auto-tune and filters is not skill no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig. Neither is shouting into a microphone behind overdriven noise-music. Being avant garde also doesn't imply skill, the relationship is not a bijection.
Death Grips is legitimately good, as in, I bob my head and sing along to it, and it gives me goosebumps because its awesome. Also, there is absolutely 0% chance you could create something that comes close to their music. Their keyboard player is an insanely talented producer and their samples are masterfully collected and utilized.
So honestly sounds to me like you are just closed minded and pretentious.
The author is referring to the up-a-half-step modulation that Barry Manilow tactically used all over the place.
I call it a "Manilow".
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But yeah, it's just one of the many elements of musical craft that's missing in today's popular music.
Sampled sounds are (by definition) lifeless.
Sequenced rhythm tracks are unnaturally consistent.
See Paul Lamere's "In search of the click track": https://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click...
A lack of rhythmic variation. Consider the folk tradition of wandering from the time signature; Pete Seeger and early Paul Simon for instance. And the Beatles, certainly
Generally a lack of pickup notes, or "anacrusis".
And the lack of an inspirational melody or chord change.
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60's pop music was, I think, a special case because the hit songs had to get noticed and appreciated in a worst-case listening environment; typically a crappy AM radio.
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Digital isn't inherently bad, but...
If the ENTIRETY of your music production is done on a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) app, with its available tools and plugins, that's gonna have an effect.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
If today's music producers used the DAW only for recording, and stayed away for composing, arranging, and becoming proficient at playing instruments, things would be much better.
It makes as much sense as saying the popularity of young-adult novels is due to authors using word processors instead of writing by hand. The two have nothing to do with each other.
"The Blues" is a very limited form, yet it has provided about a century of wonderful creative music.
If I'm writing a string quartet, I don't complain that a particular note can't be sung by a gospel choir instead of a cello. Just as a painter doesn't complain about the canvas being 2 dimensional.
Of course DAW's can handle key changes.
The issue is that working full time in a DAW environment seems to have a tendency to displace a number of important musical sensibilities.
Music, as any art form, thrives on new possibilities.
And I'm a huge fan of new possibilities.
BUT most of the musical operations we see in the digital world are not "new possibilities", but rather cheap imitations of previous work. Samples, drum machines, simulations, emulations, modeling, etc.
And especially the separation of the musician playing the instrument from the sound making mechanism. That's a biggie. It's a kind of alienation, and that's going to have a dramatic negative effect.
And this is consistent with the original complaint about modern pop music not being very good. Sure, the key change might not be the best example, but the point still stands. If there are so many new possibilities, why does the music suck?
People have been pointing out how little modulation there is in modern pop music for a while. Combined with click-tracks, pitch-correction and sampling, there is just less variation in most modern pop songs.