Interesting facts I looked at a Horse Age to Human Age Converter and using their Equestria Girl ages which to me are 16-18 and the results say that pony rarity would be 44-48
@Background Pony #9AF9
I’d agree with you there. I don’t personally care for much recent music (60s-80s are usually my favorites), but what recent songs I do like tend to be the ones that sound different from the norm.
@Background Pony #9AF9
I get what you mean, but that even if music is an art, it is also a form of entertainment. An artist expressing themselves through music is perfectly natural, but that is only one half of it, next other people have to find it enjoyable. If anything, that one genre of music is just a small portion of it, the fact that there is such a large amount of genres and subgenres in music shows the diversity within the art as I see it.
@Background Pony #9AF9
Coming from someone who doesn’t even like western pop music, I am afraid to say that nothing from that article you have quoted actually says that the music is “worse” in any way. After all, taste is subjective and equating homogenization as being “bad” is just a subjective opinion.
Unless I missed something important, if a lot of songs within a genre are sticking to similar sounds and volume that sounds more like the genre becoming more defined over time. If you value diversity, that’s fine but isn’t the point of genres to group together a bunch of similar things? As I’ve heard one person put it, “complaining about pop music being all the same is like complaining about doctors constantly using the same treatments like penicillin instead of using a wider variety like leeches and blood letting,” or something to that effect. It is hard to understand how it is bad that artists and the like are learning the most widely appealing or effective techniques to accomplish their goal.
@Background Pony #9AF9
Interesting; so they proved that music is objectively getting more homogeneous. I suppose that doesn’t necessarily mean “worse,” though it’d probably be reasonable to say it’s less interesting as a whole.
Fair enough. “Worse” is a fairly subjective term, and I did perhaps leap a bit too hard towards declaring it as a definite result. Still, I can’t help but feel that for any creative endeavor (such as music is supposed to be), a trend towards homogenization and restricted expression seems like it would be a bad thing. After all, you can probably make a decent picture by tracing another person’s work, but it will never really be more than a copy. I’d much rather see an artist try to find a unique voice of their own, or at least incorporate unique elements into what others have done, than simply focus on doing the same thing everyone else is.
@Background Pony #9AF9
Interesting; so they proved that music is objectively getting more homogeneous. I suppose that doesn’t necessarily mean “worse,” though it’d probably be reasonable to say it’s less interesting as a whole.
lets just assume that the mirror changed twilight to replicate the twilight already on that portal’s side, and Twilight’s actually much older than a teen.
@Background Pony #9AF9
Coming from someone who doesn’t even like western pop music, I am afraid to say that nothing from that article you have quoted actually says that the music is “worse” in any way. After all, taste is subjective and equating homogenization as being “bad” is just a subjective opinion.
Unless I missed something important, if a lot of songs within a genre are sticking to similar sounds and volume that sounds more like the genre becoming more defined over time. If you value diversity, that’s fine but isn’t the point of genres to group together a bunch of similar things? As I’ve heard one person put it, “complaining about pop music being all the same is like complaining about doctors constantly using the same treatments like penicillin instead of using a wider variety like leeches and blood letting,” or something to that effect. It is hard to understand how it is bad that artists and the like are learning the most widely appealing or effective techniques to accomplish their goal.
Makes me think of this Simpsons quote a bit “I used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was. Now what I’m with isn’t “it”, and what’s “it” seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you…”
This is why Equestria Girls confuse me. Age in Equestria is a really strange thing like…how old is Rarity anyway? Apparently if EqG is any indication she’s barely even legal!
Besides, it’s scientifically verifiable that pop music is slowly getting worse over time, so you’re absolutely right.
I’m curious, how would you go about proving that?
Well if you’re curious, that conclusion was actually from a study in which a team of researchers conducted a quantitative analysis of songs throughout the years and analyzed the changes that occurred in music over that length of time. You can read about it in the article where they published their findings, “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music”, or by searching for doi:10.1038/srep00521.
From the Scientific American article on the study:
The researchers based their analysis on the Million Song Dataset, a publicly available 280-gigabyte file that provides a sort of background sketch—name, duration, tempo, and so on—of songs from nearly 45,000 artists. Of the million songs therein, 464,411 came out between 1955 and 2010 and include data on both the sonic characteristics and the year of release.
Joan Serr, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, and his colleagues examined three aspects of those songs: timbre (which “s for the sound color, texture, or tone quality,” according to Serr and his colleagues); pitch (which “roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements”); and loudness (more on that below).
After peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day, the researchers found. That implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shriveled somewhat. The basic pitch vocabulary has remained unchanged—the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today—but the syntax has become more restricted. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries.
Finally, it comes as no surprise that music has gotten louder. A piece of music’s loudness is an intrinsic characteristic of the recording, not to be confused with the listener-controlled volume. “Basically, the audio signal, when recorded and stored, is physically bounded to be between certain values (+1 and –1 volts in original recording systems),” Serr explained in an email. “You can record signals fluctuating between –0.2 and +0.2 or between –0.6 and +0.6 (positive and negative fluctuations are necessary to make the loudspeaker membrane move). That’s the intrinsic loudness level we’re talking about.”
For years audiophiles have decried the “loudness wars”—the gradual upping of recorded music’s loudness over time, in an apparent effort to grab listeners’ attention. Loudness comes at the expense of dynamic range—in very broad , when the whole song is loud, nothing within it stands out as being exclamatory or punchy. (This two-minute YouTube video does a great job of demonstrating how excessive loudness saps richness and depth from a recording.) Indeed, Serr and his colleagues found that the loudness of recorded music is increasing by about one decibel every eight years.
I’d agree with you there. I don’t personally care for much recent music (60s-80s are usually my favorites), but what recent songs I do like tend to be the ones that sound different from the norm.
I get what you mean, but that even if music is an art, it is also a form of entertainment. An artist expressing themselves through music is perfectly natural, but that is only one half of it, next other people have to find it enjoyable. If anything, that one genre of music is just a small portion of it, the fact that there is such a large amount of genres and subgenres in music shows the diversity within the art as I see it.
Fair enough. “Worse” is a fairly subjective term, and I did perhaps leap a bit too hard towards declaring it as a definite result. Still, I can’t help but feel that for any creative endeavor (such as music is supposed to be), a trend towards homogenization and restricted expression seems like it would be a bad thing. After all, you can probably make a decent picture by tracing another person’s work, but it will never really be more than a copy. I’d much rather see an artist try to find a unique voice of their own, or at least incorporate unique elements into what others have done, than simply focus on doing the same thing everyone else is.
Interesting; so they proved that music is objectively getting more homogeneous. I suppose that doesn’t necessarily mean “worse,” though it’d probably be reasonable to say it’s less interesting as a whole.
I think its best to disregard all EQG logic :p
lets just assume that the mirror changed twilight to replicate the twilight already on that portal’s side, and Twilight’s actually much older than a teen.
And absolutely right!
Coming from someone who doesn’t even like western pop music, I am afraid to say that nothing from that article you have quoted actually says that the music is “worse” in any way. After all, taste is subjective and equating homogenization as being “bad” is just a subjective opinion.
Unless I missed something important, if a lot of songs within a genre are sticking to similar sounds and volume that sounds more like the genre becoming more defined over time. If you value diversity, that’s fine but isn’t the point of genres to group together a bunch of similar things? As I’ve heard one person put it, “complaining about pop music being all the same is like complaining about doctors constantly using the same treatments like penicillin instead of using a wider variety like leeches and blood letting,” or something to that effect. It is hard to understand how it is bad that artists and the like are learning the most widely appealing or effective techniques to accomplish their goal.
I’M NOT OLD, YOU ARE OLD! D8<
QUOTED FOR TRUTH
Edited
Well if you’re curious, that conclusion was actually from a study in which a team of researchers conducted a quantitative analysis of songs throughout the years and analyzed the changes that occurred in music over that length of time. You can read about it in the article where they published their findings, “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music”, or by searching for doi:10.1038/srep00521.
From the Scientific American article on the study:
I’m curious, how would you go about proving that?
Besides, it’s scientifically verifiable that pop music is slowly getting worse over time, so you’re absolutely right.
This new music ain’t got the same soul
I like that ole time rock ‘n’ roll