1) Sound spectrum. Any given individual sound.
2) Phrase. Within the song, there are phrases, or bars that are repeated, like a backbeat.
3) Song. The most macro level of the song.
1) Sound spectrumSound spectrum can be represented by any given individual sound in the song. Is the sound spectrum highly distorted or very "clean". For example, this is the difference between a trumpet holding a clean crisp brassy tone and rock guitar holding a highly distorted, reverbed, fuzzy note. This difference between distorted and clean sounds can be quantified by looking at the sound's spectrograph.
2) Phrase
Between the instantaneous sound spectrum and the song itself, the song has a series of subdivisions. For instance, the break in this song repeats every two bars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Compare that to this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
The tune by J Dilla is no less funky than that by DJ Premier (one half of the group Gangstarr), but where Premier's beat is regularly repeating, Dilla's phrases are chopped up, repeating sometimes over as little as two beats. Dilla's song is less regular, less easy to predict where it's going from measure to measure. In the Premier beat, the repeated phrase has an "open" and "close" to it. The Dilla beat, more unpredictable, seems continuously "open" and driving forward.
3) Song
This strata relates to the simplicity or complexity of the song structure. For instance, listen to Elvis' "Hound Dog":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Given the first couple of bars, you can almost sing the the entire song to yourself, even if you have only heard it once or twice.
Compare that with Charles Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song". This song has a theme, but like all Mingus tunes, its arrangement is more complex, more intricate. You might sing along, but it has not the predictability of the Elvis tune:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
"Blue Moon" would be another example of a "predictable" tune. Anything from Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" era would be on the other end of the spectrum.
Genre
One can see the dichotomy I am drawing through each of these three strata: complexity vs. clarity; repetition of the same vs. repetition of the not-same; distortion vs. purity. I argue that music genres are marked by certain traits generally conforming to the criteria outlined above.
As a shorthand, I will use "A" as the symbol for complexity/distortion, and "O" for simplicity/regularity.
|
Sound spectrum
|
Phrase
|
Song
|
||||
|
Country
|
O
|
A
|
O
|
|||
|
Indie Rock
|
A
|
A
|
O
|
|||
|
Classic Rock
|
A
|
O
|
O
|
|||
|
Metal
|
A
|
A
|
A
|
|||
|
Reggae
|
A
|
O
|
O
|
|||
|
Blues
|
A
|
O
|
A
|
|||
|
Broadway
|
O
|
O
|
O
| |||
[5.17.2021]
Same Old Mistakes
My hope is to say not that the way one has been listening to music is wrong, but here is a whole new way of listening. We can talk about music personality and music taste structurally, almost topologically as if we could trace the manifolds of one's brain.
Critics tend to only judge new music by what they know, just as generals always are fighting the last war. They miss the revolutionary moments that cut through time and rend old dogmas. Why is that? In their intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge, why are they not open to cutting edge music?
The brain is composed of pattern-seeking algorithms. The most primordial pattern is self-similarity (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,...). When we talk about "Same, Same, Same," this is what we are talking about. The fibonacci series makes up the basis for what we consider to be the existence of beauty in the world.
The amazing thing about the brain is that it is listening for both self-similarity and non-self-similarity at the same time. The only way that it pattern-recognizes for beauty is to wade through shit. And as a result, the brain is attuned to both beauty and shit. It is the shit that structures the beauty. So to listen to something really dissonant and to find the beauty in it, that is the sensation of sublimity. And likewise, to listen to something beautiful and melodic and then to hear it chopped up, scratched and screwed, is to make that beauty all the more sensational and intense, amplified. It is by virtue of the cuts, the breaks in the record, that we come to understand it using our pattern apparatus.
Here is another example:
This is a Lacanian semiotic diagram. Based upon the curvature (bend) of the knot and the trajectory of S, one can tell approximately where S will make its second intersection or stitch. Our brains are tracing the arc or path of the horseshoe, and based upon our intuition of the changing slope of the arc, we can estimate the intersection point. This stitch is like the adequation of subject and object, or as Deleuze says, the being of becoming. When listening to music, our brains are doing the same sort of pattern recognition. We are effectively desiring difference, listening to music searching for little arcs, little pockets of beauty that will satisfy these relationships. It is because the arc is offset by dissonance that we come to find it beautiful. If a painting was just littered with 2-dimensional rainbows, that picture would be banal and stupid, as beautiful as rainbows are thought to be.
When talking about music critics, the point is that these diagrams are built (structured); they are not inherent. We might have the machinery to pattern detect, but if one never listened to Nirvana before and all one knew was Frankie Valli, one might not see the beauty in it. The perception of beauty takes a disposition of openness, but it is also work. One might need to listen many times before the feelings of dissonance are structured into comprehensible arcs that become the satisfaction of the perception of beauty, much in the same way that a book that was over one's head in high school could become beloved later on. The thing about good music is that it always has a hook - even if it is challenging, it has something that causes one to come back and listen to it, listen in a new way, to attempt to deconstruct and reconstruct it mentally and in time. Music that stands the test of time has this sense of balance and challenge which makes it gratifying to listen to again and again throughout one's life.
No comments:
Post a Comment