What has happened to the melody?

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Photon46

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #40 on: 22 Sep 2010, 05:27 pm »
Are melody, harmony & rhythm what defines "music?" The dictionary may say so, but no musician with formal training would subscribe to such a narrow definition. Many years ago in college, one of the first things discussed by a music professor teaching a music intro course I was taking was whether these very elements you mention are requisite to "music." He started by playing aboriginal Australian music to the class. Well, rhythm, of a very loose sort of meter, was about the only the only one of the "big three" in that one. Classical Indian, Persian, & Pakistani music tends to have little to no harmony. Many other examples later, he had demonstrated how culturally relative the concept of music really is. All said, I know exactly what Wayner means. To geezers like Wayner and me, corporate musical outlets that control the mainstream media flow of what's hip and current are promoting a product that doesn't have much in common with what we grew up thinking pop or rock music should sound like. I think there's plenty of interesting music still being made that isn't a synthetic aural concoction. We just don't hear it anymore in the context of radio, MTV, and the usual outlets anymore. However, when I watch U.K. music festivals on Palladia music channel on cable, it seems that the U.K. music market is still more receptive to artists that hold on to old school musical values of melody and harmony.
« Last Edit: 22 Sep 2010, 11:31 pm by Photon46 »

soundbitten1

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #41 on: 22 Sep 2010, 06:27 pm »
To geezers like Wayner and me, corporate musical outlets that control the mainstream media flow of what's hip and current are promoting a product that doesn't have much in common with what we grew up thinking pop or rock music should sound like. I think there's plenty of interesting music still being made that isn't a synthetic aural concoction. We just don't hear it anymore in the context of radio, MTV, and the usual outlets anymore.

Right, it's still out there but you have to work harder to find it.

Wayner

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #42 on: 22 Sep 2010, 08:57 pm »
Then I guess an old tree that falls in the woods one day produces harmonics of some type, plus there is a rhythm element to the crash and the subsequent reverberation within the woods can now be described as "music". So what we are really saying is that anarchy has also hit the definitions of music. Soon the boundaries of any definition will be eroded away, and a fart will also be considered "music" (especially if there is a series of farts).

I once brought to my college music professor a copy of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (Mussorgrsky), and he felt that this was the greatest insult to music the world had ever seen. How the times have changed.

Wayner


sts9fan

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #43 on: 22 Sep 2010, 09:52 pm »
So you ask where the melody is. People point it out of you. Then you proceed to return to Yes and ELP as the benchmark for good music.  Why ask f you are not willing to try?

satfrat

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #44 on: 22 Sep 2010, 10:28 pm »
May I also add another layer to the thread. I try to live by this old saying:

YOU ARE THE COMPANY YOU KEEP.

W

I couldn't agree more Wayner ,,, and all the reason why this thread should have been in the AVA Circle where closemindedness is a virtue.  :roll:
 
I believe Vinyl_Lady is a perfect example of a vinyl lover who's open to all types of musical expression and she'll not be pigeonholed over format. Even tho I'm approaching 59, I hope I never lose the ability to explore new musical expressions and see the good in it. While I do have my likes and dislikes, it has absolutely nothing to do with what decade it came from. I can appreaciate all forms of music from Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga and Eninem. (I lean heavily to the latter)  :rock:
 
It's all good my friends if it moves ya and opens your heart. If not, move on,,, just don't piss & moan about it. (joking)  :lol:
 
Cheers,
Robin

Larkston Zinaspic

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #45 on: 22 Sep 2010, 11:42 pm »
Well, if we're all dealing with the same twelve notes--as I think we are--then I'd say that melody is everywhere. What I might have a problem with in a lot of today's music is lack of intention behind those weak melodies. Where is the meaning or the feeling behind any of it? It's like factory farming. In the age of consumerism & the loudness wars, the appreciation for nuance in anything musical is limited and that seems to carry over to everything else.

That said, I'd rather listen to an atonal racket played by creative musicians who strive to capture the spirit of the moment than listen to an empty melody designed to rope me in with a 'hook'.

The good news is that great music is timeless...2 years old or 200, we still have much that is relevant and not enough time on this earth to hear all of it.

jsaliga

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #46 on: 23 Sep 2010, 12:21 am »
Soon the boundaries of any definition will be eroded away, and a fart will also be considered "music" (especially if there is a series of farts).

Now that you mention it...



I won't include a link to sound samples, but yes this is real, and yes you can find it on Amazon.com. (And yes, it is music.  Just not music that I care to hear).

--Jerome

timind

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #47 on: 23 Sep 2010, 12:49 am »
Now that you mention it...



I won't include a link to sound samples, but yes this is real, and yes you can find it on Amazon.com. (And yes, it is music.  Just not music that I care to hear).

--Jerome

That music really stinks!

lonewolfny42

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #48 on: 23 Sep 2010, 02:16 am »
Quote
Webster defines music as having melody, harmony and rhythm, but there  seems to be lots of music that seems to be missing a melody.

You left off dynamics....boom, boom, pow.... :lol: :wink:

http://www.pianomusic4you.com/elementsofmusic.html



Need to catch a melody...try here....  :banana piano:

Letitroll98

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #49 on: 23 Sep 2010, 02:32 am »
Then I guess an old tree that falls in the woods one day produces harmonics of some type, plus there is a rhythm element to the crash and the subsequent reverberation within the woods can now be described as "music". So what we are really saying is that anarchy has also hit the definitions of music. Soon the boundaries of any definition will be eroded away, and a fart will also be considered "music" (especially if there is a series of farts).

I once brought to my college music professor a copy of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (Mussorgrsky), and he felt that this was the greatest insult to music the world had ever seen. How the times have changed.

Wayner

Have you ever been in the woods early in the morning?  If that's not music, I don't know what is. 

And haven't you ever heard the tune, "Beans, beans the musical fruit.  The more you eat the..."  well, I won't go on with that line. 

And I'm sorry, your prof was correct, Mussorgsky would not have been pleased with that effort.

(I apologize in advance for bustin' on ya Wayne, it was just all too easy.  I'm ashamed of myself now)

sts9fan

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #50 on: 23 Sep 2010, 02:34 am »
What Robin said.

neobop

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #51 on: 24 Sep 2010, 01:15 pm »
Afraid you're showing your age Wayner. Welcome to the old fogey club. I feel much the same as you concerning a lot of popular music. Too much head banging and not enough music - either that or vacuous sing song melodies and copycat BS with nothing to it.

But music doesn't have to fit our preconceptions of what it should be. There's lots of stuff like modern classical, out jazz, eastern or other regional music that goes outside that narrow definition. I think most would agree that it's music, even if you don't like all of it. I'd rather listen to Ravi Shankar than "Brain Salad Surgery" but that's me. That's the point.

neo

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #52 on: 24 Sep 2010, 02:24 pm »
Last weekend I went to an event called Guitar Player LIve, put on by Guitar Player magazine. The grand finish of the event was a superstar guitar player competition, similar to american idol but centered around the guitar player. Each player showed his/her playing abilities and compositional skills. The judges were Eliot East (of The Cars), Reeves Gabrels (of David Bowie), Gary Hoey, and George Lynch (of Doken). After almost every guitar player finished his amazing superhuman technical guitar playing feat, this is more or less what the judges had to say :




 If I say Crimson and Clover, or Groovin' or how about California  Dreamin' or even Owner of a Lonely Heart, I bet that almost everyone  could easily come up with the melody.
 
..............There  are several bands, groups or even individuals, that I'm sure if I heard  the song 100 times, I couldn't hum 3 notes of the melody (because there  isn't one).
 


Except for one cowboy guitar dude (who didn't win the contest 'cause he had a cowboy hat on) nobody can remember any of the music that was played at that competition. There was no melody. No musical competition. Just a very loud ocean of scales and leads, all in perfect time and pitch - but standing alone without a song. This seems to be the trend today.

orthobiz

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #53 on: 26 Sep 2010, 04:25 am »
Anybody read the Lefsetz newsletter? This thread's topic is danced around in a post he calls "feel" which discusses how music was made in the past. Production has changed, might as well be "melody" as well. Anyway, Eric Carmen wrote a reply, which follows:

From: Eric Carmen
Subject: Re: Feel

Bob,

I'm a little behind reading my email, but when I read this piece, I felt compelled to share a couple of thoughts with you.

Back in the mid to late seventies, I used to record at Sound Factory in Hollywood. So did Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and a host of other terrific artists. It was a great room, but the real reason all of us recorded there was because Val Garay, and then Greg Ladanyi, the stellar engineers who ruled that room, had learned how to make the studio as TRANSPARENT as possible. When you hear a record by James Taylor or Linda Ronstadt from that era, it's like they're sitting next to you in the car, singing in your ear, and the band is coming out over the radio speakers. It was all about getting the warmest, truest, MOST INTIMATE  vocal sound, using the best Neumann tube mics, and the fewest effects. The reason we all wanted that sound, is because we understood that in order to really connect with the listener, you had to sound real. Real as in "un-processed." Those records sound as good today as they did when they were released.

I work out every day in a gym that plays the top twenty, over and over again, so I'm forced to listen to the stuff that passes for music these days, week after week, usually multiple times a day. And the thing that strikes me about what I'm hearing is that the approach to recording these records is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what we were going for at Sound Factory. Every voice is so processed that they barely even sound human these days. Every hip-hop record has that annoying sound ( popularized by Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton in the 70's, but only used as an occasional effect during a guitar solo ) on every vocal, you know, the one that makes the vocal sound like a Middle Eastern clarinet. Additionally, where we used to spend hours trying to get the most natural drum sound and bass sound and every other kind of sound, the tracks I hear in the gym sound like they've purposely found the worst, cheapest synthesizer sound they could find, and that sound has now become "de rigueur" to
 every production.

I've always believed that the most important thing you have to do, as a singer, is convince the listener you mean what you're singing. It was never about just having a good voice. John Davidson has a pretty good voice, but Mick Jagger is a much better singer. You BELIEVE Mick! That's why Todd being all about "feel" is exactly right. It's ALWAYS been all about feel. From Sinatra to The Rolling Stones.

Years ago, I used to get a newsletter called "Who's Looking?" It came out every month, and would tell writers which artists were looking for songs, what label they were on, who their contact was, and exactly what they were looking for. If you looked up "Whitney Houston", it would say "Big Ballads, Strong Hooks, Great Lyrics, contact: Clive Davis", Arista Records.

I remember looking at the same newsletter sometime in the early to mid 90's, and instead of "Big Ballads, Strong Hooks, Great Lyrics, etc. it said simply " Beats." That was the day I knew music as we knew it was over. Every last vestige of humanity had now been officially removed. Processed vocals, cheap electronic sounds and "beats."

No songs, no melodies, no great vocal performances, just beats.

Who goes to a live concert to emotionally connect with that crap? No one. That's why music is in the dumper.

Eric


Letitroll98

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #54 on: 26 Sep 2010, 05:49 pm »
Great quote orthobiz!  Right to the point and describing exactly what I think Wayne was trying to say.  I would only repeat that there is a lot more "Big Ballads, Strong Hooks, Great Lyrics" stuff out now compared to the 90's that Eric Carmen was referring to.  Well said regardless.

SteveFord

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #55 on: 27 Sep 2010, 01:57 am »
This thread makes me think back to a visit to Guitar Center a year or two ago.
This young kid in his early 20s was playing away and he was really going to town. 
I sat there listening to him for a minute or two and it went from "that kid's really good" to "he's technically proficient but he's not saying anything at all". 
I find that to be the case with a lot of today's music, ranging from some of the current Guitar Gods to the women from the Mariah Carey/girl group school of singing. 
They may be able to blast through more notes per second and give the whammy bar a real work out at the same time or be able to sing three octaves but it just doesn't add up to anything.
Then again, it sells like crazy so what do I know?

woodsyi

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #56 on: 27 Sep 2010, 05:52 am »
This is purely my conjecture and not proven scientifically although I piece together findings from several scientific studies.

Thesis:  Musical appreciation depends on neural conditioning in our formative years and non-conforming music becomes more difficult to appreciate as we get older. 

I base this on the following theories:

1.  Music appreciation involving 12 auditory cortex works in similar fashion to that of language processing in the brain and musical grammar and diction are learned during our formative years.

Quote
Have you ever come home after an exhausting day and turned on music to relax your nerves? While you are taking it easy, your auditory cortex is not. It works hard to synthesize the several musical elements of rhythm, pitch, frequency, and timbre to create a rich auditory experience.

First, a discussion of the ear physiology is needed. Vibrating air moving at different frequencies hits the eardrum which causes the middle ear's three bones to move accordingly. The stapes, one of these inner ear bones hits on the oval window of the inner ear, and because the inner ear is filled with fluid, the bulging of the oval window causes this fluid to slosh around. The round window, also in the inner ear, compensates for the increased pressure by bulging outward. The inner ear has two functions, to transduce sound via the cochlea and to maintain a person's vertical position with respect to gravity via the vestibular system (1). . But here, we will only consider the transduction of sound. The cochlea is filled with hair cells that are extremely sensitive and depolarize with only slight perturbations of the inner ear fluid. At the point of depolarization, a neural signal is transmitted and on its way to the brain. This nerve impulse travels to the auditory nerve (8th cranial nerve), passes through the brainstem, and then reaches the branched path of the cochlear nucleus: the ventral cochlear nucleus or the dorsal cochlear nucleus. The nerve signal that passes through the ventral cochlear nucleus will reach the superior olive in the medulla where differences in timing and loudness of sound are compared, and location of the sound's origin is pinpointed (1). The nerve signal that crosses the dorsal cochlear nucleus ultimately is analyzed for sound quality.

As seen in the final step of sound transduction, the information relayed by the neural signal branches and processing occurs at different sights. No consensus has been reached as to where music is processed in the brain. Most researchers agree that the different components of music are processed in different parts of the brain, as exemplified by the branching pathway of the cochlear nucleus which facilitates the separation of sound timing and loudness with the sound quality analysis. But this information is not sufficient to answer the question of where our sense of music originates.

Frackwiak has supplied a small part of the puzzle. He conducted a study in which he had his subjects listened to different music tapes. When they listened to familiar music, the PET scan showed that the Broca's area was activated (2)., an area that is mostly associated with speaking. The rhythm tape also activated the Broca's area which can be explained by the fact that it also processes the cadence of spoken language (2).. When the timbre tape was played the right hemisphere of the brain was activated. This finding is often challenged by studies that show the left brain is activated. The pitch tape stimulated the left back side of the brain in an area called Precuneus which is associated with visual imagery (2). Frackwiak's study does not seem conclusive.

More compelling arguments better integrate the physiology of the ear with specific characteristics of music, and therefore eliminate the overlap of music and language processing. As mentioned in the description of sound transduction, the cochlea houses hair cells which depolarize to transduce sound information to the brain. These hair cells are actually organized like keys on the piano, sensitive to frequencies from low to high. When sound information reaches the auditory cortex, the neurons located there are also organized in this pattern of increasing frequency (3).

The implication of this built-in pattern in the brain is exciting because it suggests that the auditory system in humans is almost a complete replication of the natural phenomena of frequency variations. The twelve sites for music perception in the auditory cortex makes the system equally as complicated as language processing. The part of Frackwiak's study that exposed subjects to familiar music suggests that neurons "learn" to recognize tones and the groups of tones that work together. Depending on the culture in which an individual grows up in, the auditory system learns that culture's reoccurring musical themes (3). Therefore memory is closely related to music appreciation. Because neurons are programmed to remember musical patterns, the brain develops a "musical template". This template provides the listener with certain preconception of what music should be like. Thus a listener will expect certain frequencies to go well together (4). So this means that if a person hears dissonance in music, he/she will expect a following note that resolves the dissonance (4). This expectation of the sequence of notes draws on the frequency memory template in the auditory cortex.

Jessica Brock, Bryn Mawr College

2.  L2 or Second language acquisition (in non dominant L2 situation) suffers as we age.

Quote
In a nutshell, what do studies of the aging brain reveal about
L2 acquisition and processing? From the cognitive literature, we
learn that the associative memory and incremental learning elements
of language learning are steadily compromised by age, as
are the working memory and processing speed components of language
processing and production. It appears that these declines
are linear and that they begin in early adulthood and continue
throughout the life span.

David Birdsong, University of Texas at Austin

3.  Likewise, M2 (Second music) acquisition suffers in linear fashion as we age.  Sequence of notes that do not match existing templates in our neural network are not recognized as enjoyable music.  It gets more difficult as we age to acquire new templates.

jimdgoulding

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #57 on: 27 Sep 2010, 06:54 am »
This is purely my conjecture and not proven scientifically although I piece together findings from several scientific studies.

Thesis:  Musical appreciation depends on neural conditioning in our formative years and non-conforming music becomes more difficult to appreciate as we get older. 

I base this on the following theories:

1.  Music appreciation involving 12 auditory cortex works in similar fashion to that of language processing in the brain and musical grammar and diction are learned during our formative years.

2.  L2 or Second language acquisition (in non dominant L2 situation) suffers as we age.

3.  Likewise, M2 (Second music) acquisition suffers in linear fashion as we age.  Sequence of notes that do not match existing templates in our neural network are not recognized as enjoyable music.  It gets more difficult as we age to acquire new templates.
 
Woodsama- Is your thesis to explain?  Or, perhaps to stimulate readers to reflect?  Maybe examine is a better word.  I have a feeling it is the latter.  You can't possibly be about suborn'ing retardation.  What good is that.  With age comes wisdom- a wishful thinker said that- must have been.  I remain hopeful, too.

jsaliga

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Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #58 on: 27 Sep 2010, 07:18 am »
I must either be an exception or the thesis is wrong.  My musical interests have evolved and expanded over the years.  While I grew up listing to rock in the 60s and 70s, it wasn't until much later that I would take an interest in jazz (which would displace rock as a favorite), and much later still (in my late 40s) that I would start to listen to and appreciate artists such as Patty Waters, AMM, Merzbow, Swans, Peter Brötzmann, DNA and many others who have pushed the envelope and explored the outer-most boundaries of music.

My exploration of music, both tonal and atonal, continues to this day.

--Jerome

jimdgoulding

Re: What has happened to the melody?
« Reply #59 on: 27 Sep 2010, 07:22 am »
Peter Brotzmann and DNA?  You're trippin me out, dude . . brother J'rome.