>>11284

I don't have any sources so feel free to ignore me but I'm pretty sure AI has been used to produce chart music for quite a while now. Chart music has been formulaic for at least the last two decades, using machine learning and AI to pick and choose what combinations of beats and melodies are going to sell well is probably an achievable task for a masters student in AI, given the right data sets.

>>11285
I know chart music is incredibly formulaic these days but this is somehow different. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but this is above your lowest common denominator pop hit. More complex and layered.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV2s0UIPOQY

>>11284
I'm pretty sure that Max Martin is just an actor playing the public face of a song writing algorithm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zOprEiOOyc&t

This is Besthony Teethtano listening to something sort of like what you imagined. But even with a smaller amount of music, IE, one album, the computer doesn't quite know how to mix it organically. Of course, maybe a larger sample of music to reimagine would give it more options, maybe these sounds are easier to make sound dodgy than the "bland middle of the road" stuff you're talking about, and maybe other things I'm too dumb to think of right now.

Lengthy but entertaining.

http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/

>>11290

Is that visually obvious the link's underneath the picture or does it look like it ought to be some data about the photo or something?

http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/

It's totally viable for AI to write and perform songs, although professionals can knock out records so quickly that it doesn't make much difference. Mike Stock and Matt Aitken reportedly wrote I Should Be So Lucky in twenty minutes and recorded it in an afternoon, which was fairly typical of their workrate in the late eighties. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, the Brill Building in New York functioned like a songwriting factory - dozens of world class songwriters were cranking out songs in enormous quantities. The great session crews (The Wrecking Crew, The Funk Brothers, MFSB) performed on hundreds of hit records, often recording an entire album in a day. Pop music is an industrial product that purports to be art.

It's possible to do imaginative things within the pop format, but most people just don't care - they want something that sounds like all their favourite music, just slightly different. Selling intelligent and sophisticated pop music is just more effort than it's worth, especially now that no bugger actually buys records. People are still making it, but the major labels won't touch it with a bargepole.

As said already, it's just as easy for a human to write these songs. Western music theory is relatively simplistic, and pop in particular tends not to stray from an alarmingly small pool of chord progressions and keys.

I'm quite confident I could teach you how to write a song that sounds like the music you listen to, with no prior knowledge, provided I gave you a musical instrument/controller that could be set to a specific key signature.

The question of why this particular style of song is so incredibly popular is one I've never truly been able to answer - is it all marketing, or is it just that these melodies are genuinely the most resonant with us? And if the latter, is that a taught preference or innate? It's fair to say that western, chromatic music is popular the world over, but it hasn't killed off alternately tuned systems of music.

The other question I find hard to answer is, "if it's so easy, why don't more people do it?" I think that might just have more to do with being in the right place at the right time than anything else. Plus, anyone who's truly into music theory and production will typically try their hardest to do things differently and not conform to the standard, and that's how new genres are born, I suppose.

>>11292
>they want something that sounds like all their favourite music, just slightly different

I think that must be it. If you take Mr Tillman, for example, and you didn't know who the artist was then it's very plausible to believe it was by Beck. There's a fair few other sounds I recognise in there, too. I know Eels had a very similar vibe to Beck, but they never outright tried to sound exactly like him.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5B5IGqyy2s

>>11291

I should also add the KLF wrote it and that's the link to the full text.

>>11294

Blake Snyder says something similar, repeatedly, in his Save The Cat series.

>To quote the studio executive who first blurted out this rule to me, Sam Goldwyn-like, during a development meeting: "Give me the same thing... only different!"

>>11295

and that this song followed their instructions.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENsPWwFh1I

>>11293

>The question of why this particular style of song is so incredibly popular is one I've never truly been able to answer - is it all marketing, or is it just that these melodies are genuinely the most resonant with us?

It's the fast food of music - just enough flavour to satisfy, but not enough to surprise. The genre of "easy listening" was much derided, but that's a fairly accurate description of the appeal of most mainstream pop. There's nothing in a pop record that might confuse or disconcert the listener, just a simple melody over a simple progression with a simple lyric.

Sophisticated or experimental music is an acquired taste. A seventh chord is far more ambiguous than a triad, because it's really two triads stacked on top of each other - Cmaj7 contains all the notes of the Cmaj and Emin triads. Add in a bit of modulation and the casual listener can just lose the thread of where the progression is going and where it might resolve to. If you don't have a familiarity with harmonically complex music, it's like listening to a conversation in a foreign language - you know that people are talking, but you don't have a clue what they're saying.

>>11299
>Sophisticated or experimental music is an acquired taste. A seventh chord is far more ambiguous than a triad, because it's really two triads stacked on top of each other - Cmaj7 contains all the notes of the Cmaj and Emin triads. Add in a bit of modulation and the casual listener can just lose the thread of where the progression is going and where it might resolve to. If you don't have a familiarity with harmonically complex music, it's like listening to a conversation in a foreign language - you know that people are talking, but you don't have a clue what they're saying.

That sounds a bit Emperor's New Clothes to me; this music sounds like a dog's dinner but I listen to it so I can explain to people that I understand exactly what the musician has done to create this particular pile of shite.

>>11300

You might find this video informative.

>>11300

I think otherlad went to far by saying it's a foreign language. People without a music theory background can certainly understand something with weird complex melodies - jazz isn't exclusively listened to by trained musicians - but he's right that it takes a certain amount of effort or concentration to follow along - it's just that for someone who knows the theory, it's easier.

If we wanted to further torture the metaphor, you could say that just about anyone could understand two french people were having an argument or a fight or were declaring their love from one another, just by looking at them, and still get something out of that -but someone who knew the language would be able to appreciate the actual details of the conversation.

Personally as a trained musician and producer, albeit just a hobbyist at this point, when I'm actively working on projects, I find it very difficult to just turn off the theory and production ear, even when going about my daily business, I'll be listening to the radio or spotify and be thinking "ah, I see what they've done there" and makes it very hard to enjoy the music for what it is. If I take a break from writing for a few weeks, that goes away. That's probably more just a personal anecdote than anything useful to add, though.

Music theory was solved with Pachelbel's Canon, in the same sense that storytelling and film were solved by 'Hero of a thousand faces' and the original star wars, and the wheel solved transport. They haven’t but they cast big enough shadows that if you ignore them you are a fool.

Everything since them made by a professional is either a variation of them "the same thing... only different" under the understanding that they are near perfect but familiarity breeds’ contempt and there is a lot of money to be made by making the next big clone. or deliberately violating the rules, which results in contrarians regularly in sheer pretention and hubris insisting they've made something brilliant it is just that others are 'too stupid' to understand their work when they don't like it because it is a convoluted mess.


Anyway here's wonderwall


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM

I'm more or less convinced that the "pop music is actually really well written and composed to intentionally sound repetitive/familiar" argument I often hear people (I say people, I mean music tech grads who want to justify their existence) often use is completely fucking bollocks.

It's not that at all. It sounds that way because pop artists and producers are both lazy and safe, following trends which drift at a glacial pace. There's nothing secretly clever about it, it's just shit, and if you like it then I'm sorry but you like shit. There's nothing wrong with liking shit, I won't judge you for liking shit, I like a fair bit of shit myself. Just don't try and kid yourself that that bloke who writes hooks for Nicki Minaj is our generation's Mozart.

The reason it's so popular is by sheer brute force and coverage. When you listen to top 40 radio stations, you're not listening to music in between adverts. You're just listening to a non-stop 24/7 stream of advertisement. The songs are played to death, you hear it every day because that fat bint in the corner of your office kicks off if you turn it over, and before you know it you actually like it. It's self sustaining. There's nothing clever about it, it's pure financial brute force.

>>11305

>I'm more or less convinced that the "pop music is actually really well written and composed to intentionally sound repetitive/familiar" argument I often hear people (I say people, I mean music tech grads who want to justify their existence) often use is completely fucking bollocks.

I've never really heard that one, and certainly nobody's saying it in this thread.

>>11292
> Mike Stock and Matt Aitken reportedly wrote I Should Be So Lucky in twenty minutes and recorded it in an afternoon, which was fairly typical of their workrate in the late eighties.

The cocaine was just so much better back then it's unbelievable.

>>11306

Well good on you lad. I have, and I didn't say it had been used in this thread.

>>11301
I enjoyed that, thanks lad.

>>11306>>11308
You can pack that in before it starts.

I had rather mundane thought a while back that your musical taste is based on your own musical ability. So if you have no/low musical ability and have never played an instrument apart from grade 1 recorder in year 5, then modern pop music seems fine.

Where as I played piano for 5 years when I was young, and a bit of noodling on guitar over the years, and I listen to some modern pop and it seems like something I myself could knock up, or at least work out how to play pretty rapidly.

So in a very roundabout way I think I'm saying that everyone should to learn to play an instrument and perhaps the standard of pop music would have to rise.

>>11310

I'm sure plenty of Pitchfork snobs can't play instruments, like me for instance.

>>11310

You can acquire a broader musical palate without being a trained musician. Just listening attentively will allow you to develop an intuitive understanding of the grammar and vocabulary of a particular style of music. That understanding is often transferable between genres. Broadly speaking, pop music was much more sophisticated back in the 50s and 60s, in large part because most of the listeners would have been familiar with classical music and/or swing. It's a lot easier to enjoy Mongolian traditional music if you're already familiar with minimalist western composers like Philip Glass or Brian Eno; it's easier to enjoy jungle if you're familiar with garage or house.

In recent decades, most people have been exposed to an increasingly narrow range of music. Sixty years ago, most households had one radio and one record player, so music was to an extent a communal and intergenerational experience. The transistor radio and the dansette allowed teenagers to listen to their own music in their own bedroom, shutting them off from the boring music their parents listened to. The walkman arrived, then the MP3 player, then (not coincidentally) Top of the Pops went off the air. Technology gave us the ability to listen to exactly what we want, which is a double-edged sword; if you never listen to music you don't like, your tastes will never broaden.

To return to my "fast food music" analogy, it's never a good thing if we get too much of what we like. Without a lot of pushing and prodding, most kids would rather subsist on a diet of chicken nuggets and chips. It takes considerable time and effort for them to be introduced to a wider and more challenging range of foods and learn to like them. Nobody is born with a taste for broccoli or olives or chili peppers. If you don't have an older brother or a music teacher with a great record collection to broaden your horizons, you're unlikely to push through the shock of the new and develop a well-rounded musical diet of your own volition.

>>11311
Like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dVcLHRusR8

>>11312

>Broadly speaking, pop music was much more sophisticated back in the 50s and 60s

Broadly speaking or not, I've heard some of the shite my mum listened to in her day out of Jackie magazine or whatever. I don't believe we really have regressed all that badly. That music may have arguably taken a greater level of musicianship to produce than modern pop, but it was still complete bollocks.

>If you don't have an older brother or a music teacher with a great record collection to broaden your horizons, you're unlikely to push through the shock of the new and develop a well-rounded musical diet of your own volition.

Most people I know simply had their peer group and an internet connection. It's probably easier than ever nowadays for kids nowadays to grow up as prog rock snobs or that kind of nerd who only listens to doom metal, but if they're not in the kind of social circle that cares you're not going to bother.

This is only tangentially related but it's for this reason I lament the apparent downfall of youth subcultures. A great deal of musical diversity in the past several decades was tied to and thrived on the following of young punks or goths or what have you.

>>11314

There is youth subculture now it is just obsessed with gender politics instead of music.

>>11315
Whilst I think younger generations are more guarded about what they say for fear of being shouted down, I don't think that's it.

There seems to be far more pressure on kids about how they look. You see parents moulding young kids into being mini models and the like; boys about the age of 10 with faded hair, skinny jeans and tops from somewhere like Hollister or Abercrombie & Fitch. When I was that age I thought I looked the shit in my grey Adidas top with grey Adidas trackies with red trim on the stripes and a zip so I could turn them into flares. Then there's also growing up in the world of social media and the way everyone presents an artificially perfect version of themselves.

The pressure on kids today to conform is enormous. We're not letting kids be kids and grow up making their own mistakes. You don't see teenage girls caked in foundation and with wonky bright blue eye shadow anymore because they've all watched tutorials on YouTube on how to apply make-up like a professional.

>>11316

>boys about the age of 10 with faded hair, skinny jeans and tops from somewhere like Hollister or Abercrombie & Fitch. When I was that age I thought I looked the shit in my grey Adidas top with grey Adidas trackies with red trim on the stripes and a zip so I could turn them into flares.

Those are the exact same things though, aren't they? Kids wearing what's fashionable.

It's easy for us old cunts to believe that we were the last generation to do it right, but fifteen years ago I was wearing clothes as dictated by my peers, media, and the bands I listened to. I was very much part of a music scene and there were plenty of them about, and more than enough teenage subcultures. I can't imagine any of that has disappeared in such a short amount of time.

The idea that teenagers don't for groups, cliques, or subcultures now is laughable, honestly. They may not be ones you recognise (though they still exist, I see goths all the time) but they're there.

>>11317
That's a lie. The last goth in the wild died in 2007.

>>11320

They still exist, but they're mostly middle-aged. The average age at Whitby Goth Weekend must be north of 50 these days.

They've just played DJ Yoda's new track on 6Music, Roxbury. I guess that sort of music sounds very similar, but if you'd told me someone had created that track by mixing The Avalanches and Lack Of Afro together then I'd have bought it.

>>11320>>11321
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/19/chinas-goths-protest-after-woman-told-to-remove-distressing-make-up-on-subway

Maybe that's true in the West.

>>11662
Modern teen Goths exist, but they're not the massive New Rock platform boot, ridiculously baggy jeans, Cradle of Filth T-shirt wearing type from when I was a teenlad.

My lad's girlfriend is basically a goth. She wears ripped black skinny jeans, Vans Old Skool shoes and an oversized hoody or jumper. Along with the more traditional black nail polish, dark lips and too much eye shadow.

>>11663

He's doing well there. Give him a couple of years to get into the mental fetlife girls with daddy issues.

>>11663
Those goths looked like shit.

>>11664
We both definitely have a "type". It is a tad Oedipal in his case though. If I wasn't married I definitely would though.

>>11665
He's wrong about the baggies, that was crossing over into metahead territory. Your classic mid-00s goth couple was a stick-thin 6'3 whey-faced chain-smoking teenlad in tight black trousers and his short, big-tiddy (read: fat, but wearing a corset) girl in New Rocks.

>>11666
Should every father aspire to fuck his son's girlfriend? I'm not saying in a million years act on it, but it must be pretty disheartening if your son ends up with someone you don't find attractive; like they've failed.

>>11665
That's because so many of them were gawky awkward teenagers. Those that owned the look made it work for them without it looking like a phase.

>>11668

I reckon so. One generation up, but my grandad seems indignant that my cousins financee is a battleax and has a face like she chewed a wasp, and he's very rarely annoyed about anything.

>>11668
She definitely reminds me of his mum at her ages, except with less self harm scars and more tattoos. I don't think she realises that i am following her instagram and see the stories of her posing in her underwear.

>>11667
I'm talking more mid 90s NIN and Marylin Manson fan type goths. Rather than 80s Bauhaus and Siouxsie Soux types goths. By the mid 2000s they were more Emo kids listening to Fallout Boy and MCR.

I was more of a skater kid, who listened to all kinds of different shit, so my music taste is eclectic and putting some of my playlists on random will give you sonic whiplash. They'll have Devo, then Death, followed up by something off Def Jam records and end with Duran Duran.

Middle aged men are weird.

She is fit though.

>>11673
I've got an 8 month old daughter and the wife won't let me go near here as often as she did. It's like I'm going through a second puberty, a stiff breeze and I get a stiffy. I am also growing hair in places where I never had hair before, unfortunately it's my shoulders, ears and nostrils.

>>11673
>Middle aged men are weird.

Yep. Admitting that you stalk your son's girlfriend online and bash one out to pictures of her in her underwear is just plain weird.

>>11675

Come on m8, we've all done it.

I've knocked one out to my sister posting a picture like that, it's not weird because we didn't grow up together.

>>11676
I know it's a bit wrong. At least my son's Mrs isn't a blood relative.

>>11677

It's only half wrong if she's a half-sister.

>>11672
How did you get this picture of her? Is the sort of thing teenagers post on InstaBook and SnapFace or whatever now?

>>11674>>11675
Oh, I've not reached this conclusion based on future-daughter-in-law-wanker-lad alone, don't worry.

>>11679
That's maybe one of her tamer Instagram posts, though she's 22 not really a teenager.

>>11672
Doing a search for visually similar images doesn't pull up the original of that but I do recommend doing it anyway.

>>11682
Her Instagram is private, so you'd have to not only find the account you would have to have her accept you. I also chose a photo that doesn't show some of her more distinguishing tattoos.

>>11683
Her instagram might be private but she's posting close-up videos of her butthole and your son's dick in her mouth on reddit.

>>11684

Sauce or fuck off.

>>11684
As long as his face ins't in the pictures I don't give a shit. He's 20, I did a lot of dumb shit at that age, I just didn't have camera phones and social media to remind me of it.

>>11686
It's one thing to not care that he's in porn, seems a bit stranger to be walking the edge of actually seeing it yourself while having a cheeky one off the wrist to her other content.

>>11685
You can find the source by using Yandex to reverse search the image. I'll leave it at that; if the poster doesn't want more people finding her then he can just delete it.

>>11689

Quick work, lad.

I've seen your son's cock now, otherlad, and also his girlfriend's tits.

The internet is fantastic

>>11690
>I've seen your son's cock now
It's a funny old site is .gs.

>>11691

I just like having that sort of connection with all of you. Once I knock one out to the girlfriend later, that lad, me, and his son, will have an unbreakable wank bond. It's beautiful, really.

>>11689
Thanks for the heads up and deleting her username. I don't care about strangers seeing it, more people within his social circle at uni. As I said he's an adult should be free to do what he wants, but I don't want anything to happen to him socially.

Also that's the carpet in his bedroom here and he's not been here since New Years. He should also take his socks off for fuck's sake.

She's charging fourteen quid a month to look at her porn, you can get a full brazzers pass for that. Kids these days, they expect the bloody world.

>>11693

I shouldn't have posted her handle at all really. I think your attitude toward the whole situation is fairly commendable, even if mumsnet types might throw a hissy about it.

>>11694
If she had any sense she'd be streaming herself on Twitch or whatever and getting loads of money through Patreon. I think that's how it works.

I don't understand what the tattoo on her leg is meant to be.

>>11694
You're paying for the intimacy of being one of her few subs, with whom she'll probably interact and take suggestions from, not for the breadth of porn available from through the pornhub separation of user and content provider.

>>11695
I was 19 when my boy was born, meaning that on his 19th birthday, he was half my age and same age I was when he was born. I am not your usual clueless parent when it comes to the internet. I was downloading shit off BBSes in the mid 90s using a 28.8kbs modem. I have grown up with the internet and message/imageboards. I do my best to not post anything incriminating.

I'm just glad that my old Myspace account got deleted years ago. Looking back on that, some of it was really fucking cringeworthy. I've had to grown out of being the shitlord I was when I was in my 20s. Once social media became so prevalent and potential employers start scraping through your Facebook and Twitter, I had to lock that shit down.

>>11694
Fucking hell she is either doing some disgusting clips4sale shit or she is stringing along some right white knight sad acts. I'd rather pay for Pornhub premium. Either way fair play to her if it's getting her an extra night out on the piss or something.

>>11698
>I'm just glad that my old Myspace account got deleted years ago
Myspace recently revealed they "accidentally" deleted all their content from 2003-2016 so a lot of cringeworthy stuff has probably vanished.
I could never remember if I deleted my old account so I'm feeling happy about that.

>>11699
I didn't realise they were still going. I used FaceParty before MySpace, which had an absolutely ridiculous amount of child groomers on the site.

>>11699

I do regret not having access to my messages, though. I pulled so many birds via Myspace, literally got them to come visit me in my city and stuff, I had NO IDEA how well I was doing for myself back then.

It was a perfect platform for that, really. No profile was private, or hidden away, and you could fully customise your profile page - it would play a song, you could neatly arrange your coolest friends in a list, it would even let you do actual HTML to customise the look of everything.

And you could broadcast your posts to everyone, you could leave posts sat on your page like blogs, you could respond to just about anyone. If you were in a band, and of course you were, because you were on myspace you'd get streams of girls adding you, responding to your daft teenlad poetry, reading your dodgy song lyrics. And the only way to respond to some of this was by DM, really - so you were already half way there.

You'll never see something quite like that again. I think the extreme ability to personalise your profile was the biggest thing, everyone's social media looks the same by design now, but back then putting a herringbone background on my page and an obscure acoustic version of an Alexisonfire song on autoplay, that was enough to stand out from the crowd.

>>11701
I felt bad for decades for trying to get a msn girlfriend to talk dirty to me but reading your post for some reason it just clicked that actually, given that she called me fifty times in one night actually we were both being stupid kids.

>>11702

Exactly. I didn't figure out for a long time that girls are just as interested in you as you are in them, especially at that age. Seems ridiculous now, but if you're not one of those mega high confidence teens you see on American TV, then you're going to naturally assume that you fancy them and that's it.

There's more than a few moments back then I look back on now as an 'experienced' man and think "oh for fucks sake, she wanted a shag, didn't she?". I remember one girl invited herself over to my house, and we ended up daring each other to touch each other, like "I bet you won't rub here!" "I bet you won't take your bra off, chicken!" like it was an endurance competition or something. Despite a few hours of that I never even tried to lean in for a kiss, nor did she. I distinctly remember not even considering it, thinking that she really was just playing a weird competitive dare game.

That was at least fifteen years ago and I still think about how fucking daft that was. Particularly since neither of us were even virgins at the time. What the hell was stopping us?

>>11703
Being in my early twenties, being able to drive and being a vocalist in a band meant I got a few ladies massaging me on Myspace. There was honestly a different one every weekend for the space of a couple of months. I was being a total tosspot, because I would block them on MSN afterwards and start chatting up some other girl.

One of the things that stopped all of that was the one time I met up with a girl who said she was 19, but looked more like 14. She really didn't look like the girl in her pictures either. I was thankful that I listened to my head and asked for ID. She sort of broke down and admitted that the pictures were her older sister and she had just turned 15.

>>11701
I am surprised that no one has ever tried to replicate Myspace. I know Tumblr was kind of similar, but the site was shit for bands trying to promote their music. What is there nowadays apart from Soundcloud or Bandcamp?

>>11705

Most bands I know have moved to Facebook, which isn't a great music platform either, but it's there, and at least it has a strong system for setting events etc.

>>11696
The tattoo on her leg is a portrait of a person in an oval frame. The thing is she didn't get it finished, before starting on another tattoo on her arm. So she has 3 unfinished tattoos on her body.

>>11707

She sounds like just the right amount of mental slag.

>>11703
>I didn't figure out for a long time that girls are just as interested in you as you are in them

I thought about this when we were talking about internet virgins a few days ago. I fondly remember the time I "went out" (to a bowling alley ffs) with a girl around 17 and we had a long long chat, and she talked about boys and stuff - and me. It never went anywhere (because I didn't know how to close the deal, nor did she) but it was very formative in that I realised what you're talking about it. A proper OH GOODNESS ME moment.

>>11709

It's slightly distressing how many of these moments there were for me. I still did alright, but I'm pretty sure I would still be a virgin now if I didn't happen to meet a few girls who were willing to make the first move. That's really what got me started. It wasn't even like I was nervous or scared of these girls, just oblivious, and under the assumption that it was a one way feeling.

What a weird thing, though. Oblivious to their hints, yet still constantly horny and wanking for England.

And now that I think about it, accidentally playing hard to get would have made them want me even more. Fucks sake.