2010年 12月 29日 水曜日 19:13
It's not a secret that every musical composition in the most general form can be described by an acoustic formula. For instance, let's consider the following:
Y = X1 + X2 + X3 + , , , + Xn where Xi is a variable that in a given proportion and succession shows the quantitative form that represents all the acoustic qualities of any composition and let us describe it in musical notes. To go further , two probabilistic concepts should be taken into consideration. Firstly, the more statistical data you have, the easier it is to find out whether there is trend or not. Secondly, if there is a trend you can predict its future data with a certain degree of exactness.
People often say that pop music is the same. And from the mathematical point of view it's the truth simply because in a given point of time we can find an almost linear relation between the popularity of a given song in general or in a given genre etc and it's acoustic qualities. Proceeding from the previous paragraph we can be sure that there is quite enough statistical data to say that we can simply measure what acoustic qualities of compositions in a given period of time are trendy thus we can write a formula of pop music for a given period of time which can look something like this (only an example):
α = S1+ S2 + … + Sn. But unlike the previous formula this formula has a certain degree of variability , thus it's not a determined acoustic interpretation of a given song but a formula that shows us most though not all possible proportions and successions of different acoustic qualities.
Firstly, there is no doubt we can prove that trendy music is trendy. Secondly, it seems like pop artists can feel the trend, they have an almost mystical understanding of probability of art. For instance, Lady Gaga managed to hit major charts simply because she intuitively managed to comply with the rules of the abovestated formula by writing several ridiculously popular songs.
On the other hand, people that devote themselves to a limited amount of genres and are proud of it, have nothing to be proud of. In fact, genres like power metal or symphonic metal have even less variable acoustic formula than GaGa has. The situation from this point of view is even worse for genres like raw black metal or funeral doom etc.
If we push this probabilistic concept of quality of music even further then academic composers create the best music, in other words their music can't be even observed as a formula . Moreover, academic music has been progressing and creating innovations for more than 1000 years and that means that it is continuously becoming more and more sophisticated and the theory is more and more complex. The greatest example of such fact is Iannis Xenakis. Many pretentious people say that art is art and theory is theory but they are wrong. As now you know that a musical composition is a formula then it's easy to comprehend that an average academic composer have better formal skills in or let's simply say better at creating formulas that an average amateur composer. Simply because of the skill. Somewhat similar thing with playing a musical instrument - if you have skills you play better.
To sum up, people are different ,thus for most of us originality is not equal to enjoyment so there is nothing wrong with listening to pop music ( no one knows what's good and what's bad anyway) but you should really think about what you are listening to if you want to call yourself a person with a good taste in music.
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