You only have to watch/listen to the first minute. I started looking at GarageBand because it seemed very interesting and loaded with possibilities. But I am starting to realize that the way it works reveals something of the sociology of popular music. But that is a topic for another post! Right now I just want to talk about the relentless busyness of so much music today. Here is another example, a cooking video about making dumplings:
I just want you to notice the music: drum breaks, and frenetic funk, at a lower volume, even during the narration. I don't think I need to provide many examples as this kind of brisk, even frenetic, soundtrack can be found in nearly every non-classical music video on the web. Here is another example with a more ominous soundtrack, but still busy:
At some point I realized that I really hate busy music. Why? It is generic, falling into a fairly limited group of musical ideas and gestures, it is redundant in that the busyness requires a lot of repetition, and most of all, it is extremely distracting. I suspect that to most people it is not as distracting because they are not trained listeners so the soundtrack is likely perceived as a kind of musical wallpaper, just there. Or perhaps it is intended to brighten up the atmosphere and is perceived that way. But if you focus your attention on it, it becomes astonishingly annoying. To me at least.
So, busy music. The busyness of it is supposedly good for the business of music and I suppose it is. In pop music you have to keep prodding your listeners to remind them how wonderful the music is.
I suspect that contemporary classical composers have reacted to this in various ways. I certainly have. We might do a brief survey. The most radical response might be John Cage's 4'33 which consists of nothing but silence. But there are a host of other examples: Steve Reich's Drumming which starts with isolated beats on a small drum. Morton Feldman's chamber music which often consists of an hour long movement with just a few notes and chords. I wrote a piece thirty years ago that consisted in one chord on guitar arpeggiated in various ways, and two notes, repeated, on flute. Nico Muhly did a whole album based on drones. Arvo Pärt has written many pieces based on very simple structures and with a minimum of busyness. Lots of other examples. Mind you, some classical composers are very busy indeed. Elliot Carter's music is densely packed with themes, structures, rhythms and harmonies as is music by Brian Ferneyhough and many others.
Apart from aesthetic considerations, I seriously wonder what kind of effect these relentlessly busy soundtracks have on the reasoning powers of the listeners? How can you think and evaluate the message of the video when this soundtrack is pounding at you? But that too is a topic for another post.
Your thoughts?
I don't know if this qualifies as a thought or a caution. Youtube is not a place set up for accurate music reproduction. It is essentially a place for ads like old TV. The vast majority of people post things for clicks, page views and their little checks from youtube each month. My main audio system is able to clearly resolve busy recordings that are normally recorded whether analog vinyl or digital disc. What it cannot do is make recordings with dynamic range restriction (the loudness wars) listenable.
ReplyDeleteBut circling back to TV this is exactly what was done to TV ads. Dynamic range restriction allowed the average loudness to be near the legal peak volume all the time. It's not busy it's just loud. This is an artifact of digital recording playback processes. You cannot do this on a vinyl record because of the laws of physics - the stylus would jump out of the groove. In digital though you can go right up to digital zero regardless. This is what produced the vinyl revival. Engineers had no choice but to master albums more normally for records than for the CD or digital file.
Oh, no, YouTube is not about quality audio, but as we see from all sorts of videos recently posted from the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw and other places, it is quite possible to do a pretty good job with both video and audio. Mind you, it is crucial to have a good sound system connected to your computer. I have one from Klipsch with a subwoofer that is excellent.
ReplyDeleteI think the dynamic range compression is actually a different issue. What I wanted to talk about in this post was the actual musical busyness of the soundtracks: thump, thump, scurry, scurry!
Again, the loudness (dynamic range restriction) issue does very much interact with perceived busyness. Think about a typical symphonic orchestration. Now imagine each instrument equally loud all the time like they were all trumpets and trombones. With the expansion of multitrack recording this is easy. A good recording engineer could turn the same tracks you find objectionable into something quite listenable just by rebalancing everything the same way a composer orchestates texture and balance.
ReplyDeleteAlso remember that most people view youtube on their mobile device often in noisy environments. It may be depressing but many studies show that people think louder audio is better audio.
I think the concept of busyness is a bit slippery because this is the usual accusation against newer music along with dissonance through history. Too many notes Mozart!! Of course there is the reaction to more complex music by simplification through the centuries as well. I'm just noting that criticizing busyness is like criticizing tempo as it doesn't really explain much by itself.
Oh darn, I have to define my terms! On reflection I think the busyness that I am trying to point to is partly rhythmic, there is just always so much happening. And also, there is a kind of pointlessness to it.
ReplyDeleteI think it's all to do with psychology. The annoying music is there to fill a gap, not to do anything else. If there is no background noise, the listener perceives that "something is missing", and it feels odd to them, and therefore the product, service or instructional video feels "off" and therefore untrustworthy. You see it in mainstream films, with incessant background noise, the need to "control" attention spans for fear of losing the audience. Some people are turned off by supposed arthouse or foreign cinema due to "silent spaces". See Michael Haneke's films. The lack of score, in "Hidden/Cache" for example, forces the viewer to confront the situation in front him/her and try to figure it out by themselves. So "busyness" music is merely marketing, a device used to try to enhance involvement in the viewer. But you have to make an effort to ignore it to get to the meat of the message. And yes, it is darn annoying and interrupts my attention, rather than making me concentrate. It is trying to be as generic and inoffensive as possible, whereas Mozart is trying to entertain us.
ReplyDeleteIt happens I was blogging over the weekend about Leonard B Meyer on what can seem to be inversely proportional relationships between tempi and textural activity in what he called syncactic and statistical parameters. I was writing about how Meyer inadvertently anticipated the rise of "crescendo rock" as an outworking of the aesthetic ideologies of Romanticism.
ReplyDeletehttps://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/06/leonard-b-meyer-on-romantic-era-shift.html
A short quote from Meyer:
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The implicative tensions of syntactic processes and the bodily tensions of statistical processes (e.g., insistent durational patterns, unusual speed, intense dynamics, extreme registers, etc.) seem to be inversely related to one another. The more forceful one is, the less compelling the other. This may be why a plaintive adagio seems more “emotional” than a persistent presto and why fulsome motor-tension seems excitedly active but not very “emotional.” Put crudely, marked motor activity tends to diminish cognitively generated tension (people go to the gym to “work off” their business-kindled frustrations). Similar highly motoric music—for example, Rossini’s William Tell overture—curbs patent emotional experience.
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Meyer might have identified what it is about "busy" music that seems to lack emotional nuance for many listeners. You can only have so much activity across all parameters of music before a cognitive law of diminishing returns kicks in. All the examples you used, I was noticing, are BACKGROUND soundtracks that nobody is supposed to give close attention. We're supposed to be able to tune it all out in what Meyer called the "redundancy" of musical information.
Sure, YouTube sound is not the glorious audiophile experience of, say, a surround-sound SACD on BIS or Harmonia Mundi. However, the decently high-bitrate Opus codec that YouTube uses today is by any measure more faithful than the AC3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS codecs that were the only audio available on many classical-music DVDs. And of course, the video quality is already higher-resolution than the DVD era. So, if you bought classical DVDs, then there is really no reason not to watch the YouTube broadcasts uploaded directly by the orchestras.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Anonymous, for explaining why I find the audio and video of recent YouTube clips as being surprisingly good.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks, Wentatchee, for articulating, with help from Leonard Meyer, what I observed but did not clearly express about soundtracks.
I was watching the Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society the other day and I swear he didn't use a bit of music on the soundtrack for nearly the first hour. Then a jubilant soccer game was accompanied by a brief excerpt from Beethoven's Ninth.