I couldn't watch the whole thing because I was so grossed out, not that somebody put those 4 notes together first and deserves compensation for everyone else copying but by how inane and tedious all that music is. (I know, I'm old, it's not for me.)
२७ जुलै, २०२६
"Once you hear it, the ‘Gen Alpha melody’ is everywhere."
A WaPo headline aptly states. Here's a gift link to the article, and here's the viral video it's talking about:
पोस्ट्स
४२ टिप्पण्या:
Baby formula.
I was discussing the subject of modern music with my granddaughter. I told her I liked real people’s voices and music that is unique. She asked what I meant by real people’s voices. I answered that I liked music with less machines manipulating the voices. She asked for examples and we spend a good hour listening to the difference. She called me yesterday to suggest that I listen to “Lean on Me” (LOL) because she thought it was real singing. I think at 7 she hears the difference.
1. Self-production became possible in the 1990s and cheap by the 2000s. Get a cheap mic and mixer from Amazon. Attach to a PC and download software. Generate technical recording output equal or better to studios as late as the 1980s.
2. Digital distribution became cheap with MP3s 25+ years ago. When a record label had to fund A&R staff plus LP, CD, and cassette production they edited heavily and avoided duplicating competing bands (i.e., copyright lawsuits).
3. Most people aren't creative at all. Youth imitate what they hear and like. Most will never make anything unique, and most content isn't unique ever. In the old days many top performers were fed unique content from teams of dedicated writers.
Mature industry with a strong back catalog = no one cares but the performers and their cliques.
Maybe it’s not a perfect match, but the song that immediately came to mind when hearing samples of that melody was Viva La Vida by Coldplay.
Lennon/McCartney
I jumped around the introduction to get the idea; it was painful to watch even 1 minute of that 14-min video. Simple melodies get repeated. That's not stealing and nobody deserves to get paid.
Many people here are probably familiar with the Pachebel rant. It says the same thing, but far more enjoyably.
So, I watched the entire thing, despite the factor Althouse mentions. I found that factor annoying too, early in this analysis video. But this changes later and there is a LOT of fascinating information and analysis in this. I am likely to watch it again (though I may fast forward through the first part, ahem).
I initially thought of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," as a variation. I thought that was well done at the time and also now. I almost stopped and commented about that, but instead I persisted and--sure enough--the guy got to that. It turns out her song is missing one of the pillars of the melody he's talking about, and he gave other examples. Amusingly, the ones he gave and included in a segment called "Outliers," I found mostly better than the other stuff. Coincidence? I don't know.
He says and demonstrates a variety of interesting things, and in the end he traces the first instance to a singer I'd never heard of, Anastacia, in a 2004 song. (It, too, I found better than a lot of the stuff he "unpfronted" in the video. I'm not saying a loved it, mind you.) He also references a Beatles song and shows the clip, but doesn't believe that it's the source or inspiration.
Overall, fascinating, and as I said, I'll be watching it again.
I have to say, part of my attraction to this most likely stems from the manymanymanymanymany conversations I had with my late professional musician parents growing up and later. I suppose my reaction are partly filtered through that profound experience (which at the time was just everyday normal to me).
Brylinski got it.
One of the things I inherited from my dad was his albums, and this included a collection of complete box sets (yes, plural sets) that he used specifically to teach music theory and music appreciation for many years at the university level last century.
This is sort of inspiring me to get his turntable and sound system (also inherited) and start working my way through them. I'm in the middle of a move, so I can't prioritize that yet. But I'm looking forward to it!
And here is The Commitments also making the same point. But better.
Should this guy pay royalties to all the people who said the same thing he did before him?
Meade and Brylinski: The guy in the video does indeed reference the Beatles, as I mentioned in a comment above, at the very end (sorry for the spoiler):
"It's Only Love".
I wonder how much time the guy spent on this research. It's interesting, and I'm glad he did it. I'm not a YouTube gal, like so many people are these days; I just never got in the habit. But I'd sure consider subscribing to his channel if I did become a YouTube gal.
Axis of Awesome Four Chord Melody points out many similar songs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
Maybe we need to get over this idea that four notes in a definable composition
David Bennett's channel routinely points out melody 'ripoffs' -- to include how pop takes from loads of classical music. Before pointing fingers or threatening lawsuits...
https://www.youtube.com/@DavidBennettPiano
This reminds me of 1955 Oscar winner Tiomkin stating he wanted to thank the "colleagues" who made him successful: Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, and others.
Thanks for the video that was fascinating.
I forgot what the copyright age is now, 1926? So, you can steal any melody of any song before that.
As a complete dummy when it comes to music, I'd have thought every good song melody had written by now by somebody. We've had thousands or even millions of talented people writing songs since the "Music Industry" came into being.
That's even pre-Beatles man. Probably first written in the 1600s?
@J L Oliver What a gift to this child! When I think of all the recordings she may discover through the door she just opened with your help, it makes me want to 1. cry, or 2. go on that journey myself, as if I didn't know the recordings I already know.
“ I couldn't watch the whole thing because I was so grossed out…by how inane and tedious all that music is. (I know, I'm old, it's not for me.)”
I didn’t watch much either, but I kinda liked it. (I know, I’m young.) I like music that sounds good. What do I care if it’s not “original”, “unique”, or it’s processed by machines or A.I.?
Same with art. I’m always amused when people pay millions for an original painting, only to have experts carefully examine it and find out it’s a copy. If you couldn’t tell the difference what difference does it make? And maybe the copy is actually better than the original. Wonder what would happen if you told A.I. to make a copy of the Mona Lisa, only better. Maybe it would!
Of course, there is much copying, much more today than ever, but I assume that songwriters experimenting and searching for hooks, all using the same notes, often come across the same melodies spontaneously and innocently without hearing them, or at least not remembering hearing them.
With so much money at stake, and the market being so easily sold, excessive copying is just inevitable right now. That could change.
Enigma talked about how self-production made professional level music creation available to any musician.
The internet and various apps like YouTube and Spotify and many others made it possible to get distribution without the need for a record company.
That's all great for people who are already musicians. But what about the rest of us?
Suno.com uses AI to create music including lyrics and vocals if desired. No musical ability required. A year and a half ago I created a song about packaging machinery just fooling around. Sent it in to my editor as a lark. Her response was to ask if she could publish it in the magazine and it was apparently very popular.
https://www.packagingdigest.com/machinery/a-new-way-to-tune-up-your-packaging-line
I used it the other day to generate some very nice, IMO, background music for some machinery videos I was making.
I've gotten hooked on 2 types of AI as background music when I am working in my office. One is a series called Black Cats Jazz which calls itself "Vintage noir jazz for late night relaxation" Here is one of them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meyUsak02Wc&pp=ygUUYmxhY2sgY2F0IGphenogbXVzaWM%3D
Another is techno classic. Grieg, Bach, Wagner, Tchaichovsky and other classical works set to a techno beat. Unusual but works well for me as background music.
Hint: They are al full of ads so I download the audio as MP3 and listen via my regular music player on desk or phone. Here is Greig's Morning Mood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZuZBm086R8
John Henry
As a kid, I read a bunch of books by Gene Stratton-Porter, a woman of the early 20th century, that my grandmother had given to my mother. She's definitely problematic in some areas by today's standards, but she was among other things a dedicated environmentalist.
In one of her books, a piece of the plot involves a nature-loving woman pointing out to a friend, a concert singer, that classical composers sometimes lifted sections of birdsong for their works. The two women travel into the tamarack swamp, sheet music in hand, in the pre-dawn hours to hear the dawn chorus and follow along.
I wondered about AI music in popular culture and asked Grok.
It listed a number of pure AI records that had charted in various categories including “Walk My Walk” No. 1 on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales for multiple weeks and R& B "artist" Xania Monet who reached #1 on the Billboard R&B chart.
So you don't have to be able to sing, play or know much about music. Anyone can be a musician.
Yeah, as David Hockney said, most of it is crap and doesn't deserve to be remembered. But is that not true of the majority or music over the past 200 years?
John Henry
Re Suno forgot to mention. Tina mentioned that she would like to hear James Brown with a klezmer band. I thought that was a bizarre enough idea that I wondered what it would sound like. So I asked Sunpo to make a cover of James Brown singing Orange Blossom Special in an R&B style with a klezmer band.
You can do that with Suno. It gave me a couple of versions, none of them great but none terrible, either. Just a bit strange.
And a comment about the tune in the post. I did not listen to the whole thing, perhaps the first 30-60 seconds. It sounded like fairly standard 70s disco to me. No worse than most disco.
John Henry
One other benefit to Suno. No copyright problems, no licensing fees.
Solomon told us there is nothing new under the sun. Who knew he was talking about pop music?
@ Kylos
Same. That's exactly what I heard, too, although I couldn't name the song until I went looking for a snippet of the lyrics.
The autotuning is painfully overdone. When I listened to this, it reminded me of some of the worst, New Wave, pop of the 80s. Seriously, when you hear the first drum beats, you expect the song to be, Take on Me, by A-ha. This video reminds me of that comedy video on YouTube, Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles), where the comedians prove that a lot of rock power ballads were made up of the same four chords.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
It is, indeed, interesting. I wonder how he happened to catch on to it. I suppose one must listen to a LOT of contemporary popular music to hear it.
@Joe Bar --
Automated scanning tools work with music too. It's how music AI becomes generative AI.
Other music commentators have fun using software to compare real vocals to Autotuned vocals -- if it's too perfect, if the singer has aged, etc. Dead giveaway.
When we someday all finally agree that AI does everything better than we do, what's left for us to do? It's time to start thinking about it.
“Other music commentators have fun using software to compare real vocals to Autotuned vocals -- if it's too perfect, if the singer has aged, etc. Dead giveaway.”
I’ve seen some of those; it’s really interesting. When they did Karen Carpenter they found she was actually more perfect than autotune.
“When we someday all finally agree that AI does everything better than we do, what's left for us to do? It's time to start thinking about it.”
No need. When the time comes, A.I. will take care of it. You won’t feel a thing.
It's the musak at Goodwill stores everywhere.
Frank Zappa warned you.
"I couldn't watch the whole thing …"
You should have; apparently it all stems from The Beatles.
At the 6:30 mark, I was thinking “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
I may be wrong, but I think there's a passage in 'Fairest Isle' by Henry Purcell that uses the main melodic features the young gentleman describes in the video.
The Axis of Awesome has been onto this for at least 16 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
That crap repetitive music is like a gray kitchen
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