And if you haven't heard it yet... read the story of Little Adolphe Sax and the not-so-competent time travellers in the description of the video. It's relevant ;-) Also have a look at Antonio's videos: ruclips.net/video/dlBRJbbCoSE/видео.html ruclips.net/video/CTnuzK-YOxU/видео.html
I have some pianists among my students. It really depends on your goals. If you are interested, let's continue this conversation through email to not clog this comment section. Tommaso@musictheoryforguitar.com
@@MusicTheoryForGuitar : Is it okay if I wasn't offended? ^-^ Edit: That was in response to the video, reading the story now, apologies... That's a hilarious and poignant story, lols. I'm fairly certain that the snobs are why a lot of people don't like jazz. But I've seen some of this snobbery in every genre too. It's never pretty.
@@MusicTheoryForGuitar Steven Fry's 3rd novel, "Making History" is pertinent to the idea of the time-travelling Jazz haters... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_History_(novel)
The famous italian composer Luciano Berio once told that music in an art in which three persons contribute actively: the composer, the performer and the listener!
Melody. Harmony. Rythem. Long ago, the three elements of music lived together in peace. Then everything changed when the snob listeners attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all music theory could stop them. But when the world needed him most, he vanished.
You can actually do it in about one hour of training. The first time it could be painful. I am a natural vertical listener, every sound on distorted guitar for example is noise to my ears if I don't train to relax the "vertical" thinking. Here's the official video course ruclips.net/video/PFRKBYq7_lw/видео.html
@@SuperEricdolphy I can't quite pin in my mind what "vertical listening" is. Maybe you mention in a different thread here. Can you give a quick definition, or a link?
When I got into buying music in 2014, I made a point of buying 4 or 5 albums at a time, each in a different genre, that way it wouldn't be too same sounding to my ears. So I would get Gwen Stefani, Genesis, Pearl Jam, David Bowie, and Keiko Matsui, and that would be different enough for my ears. But I do notice that I naturally go for more melodic and rhythmic music over harmonic music. I have a hard time with jazz in general, but jazz fusion, smooth jazz, or bebop don't bother me as much, probably because those styles put more emphasis on melody and rhythm. If i can't catch the melody or rhythm, I tend not to like the music even if I find it technically and musically impressive.
Interesting point. While appreciating music that pushes the boundaries of mainstream I too gravitate toward melody and rhythm. They can be non mainstream band music by the way but lately I've found there is a cross pollination from style to style in the mainstream. A really cool example of this was Nirvana and their use of heavy guitars. Modern bands tend to look back to eras where simplicity in melody and rhythm were the key. I'm sorry I'm raving.
Question for you sir: do you happen to like heavy metal? Cause for me heavy metal is mostly melodic and rhythmic. There are other types of metal, but heavy metal for the most part I would classify like this.
@@DerikHendric I love heavy metal. I didn't used to listen to it that often, but over the past 2 years I've really gotten into it (thanks to RUclipsr Razorfist). The same thing with early grunge music. Alice in Chains 'Would' is a perfect example of the sound I love.
@@JustSomeGuy and that's the "taste in music" theory working! You should be more of a melodic/rhythmic person. You could try to listen to some Dream Theater songs. Dance of eternity has more complex rhythms and harmonies. I'd love to know you thoughts about this song!
Maybe it can be extended to timbre as well, for example people who don't like Billie Eilish, usually don't like her music because of her vocal style and sound, not because of the composition itself
Yes, and the same goes for another styles like metal, that is mostly based in a loud and heavy sounding, or rap, which is driven by the voice and flow of the artist.
@@neverending7949 its not only based on that. Theres a lot of cool things in metal, i heard a group use pianos and lot of things like that. Just go in the metal category on spotify or whatever you listen music on, and try to find new metal music, other artists, or stuff like that. You'll see nice and interesting things for sure
As a former snob who hated pop music, I have found that listening to pop has become much more gratifying when I focus on the timbral element, because there can be a lot of production elements that satisfy my need for complexity in some form. Modern pop has a ridiculous amount of sonic layering and new synthesized sounds, and the more I learn about how those things work, the more interested I become in it (also, it doesn't have to always be layered to hell and back: sometimes producers take minimalist approaches to timbre and fill space in a very efficient way, which is also interesting and engaging).
I completely agree with what you said, but that's also how I would explain why I don't like pop. They do put a lot of emphasis on filling the spectrum efficiently and creating new sounds, tweaking little parameters to make things "just right", but they completely abandon all other elements of the music, especially harmony. I'm not a big fan of jazz, but harmony is very important to me in music, but most pop uses the same chord progression, when they could have spent literally just 10 minutes coming up with something a bit better than Am F C G. I just view it as lazy and unoriginal
@@MozartJunior22 exactly, there's literally no musical knowledge required to make a pop song. Just shout at the mic and let autotune do the job, then just put the 4 chords on loop. Voila! You have an entire genre.
At worst you're only ever one note away from a good note. Yea, that's not really true, lols. Wish I understood it much better too. But learning a little more each day is helping.
Thanks Tommaso and friends for the wonderful chats here. This is a rare place in social networks where our love for art overcomes all hatred and stupidity. Love you all! ♥️
Great video! It reminds of when I was a grad student-I am a country music fan and had gotten tired of people saying how “corny” the songs were. I wrote a paper that compared the stories in opera and country music. Guess which was cornier. I called the paper “It ain’t worth a dang if it ain’t got that twang.” Thanks for the enlightening video!
Well I mean cornyness is also not some objective thing, it seems kind of biased to me to reason that opera is more corny than country when you're a country fan. As corny is a negative quality, you will naturally gravitate to listening to music that does not sound corny to you. Im curious how you defined cornyness in your paper.
To be honest, I observe that most people like music not for any intrinsic feature of the composition but because they have formed a bond with the experience of listening a piece... as in many friends listening a particular type of music and wanting to communicate with them better, or a person that the listener admires or looks up to recommending a particular kind of music... as well as just habit, i.e. that music genre being available at the time.
I like this framework a lot - I think I would add the importance of approaching music with a sense of openness. When listening to a piece of music, instead of determining whether you like it or not, try to determine what aspects (harmonic, rhythmic or melodic) are interesting - what is it that people like about this piece of music. All styles of music become more interesting if you can cultivate a curiosity about them. Separately, a "Music Snob" is defined as much (if not more!) by the music they don't like as the music they do - this should be anathema to anyone who claims to love music.
In fact the tests I do to understand a listener perceptions are negative... M and H sometimes love some artists both, but for example a M listener can tolerate Hendrix, a H listener would be overwhelmed by distortion and hate it.
I think that a Harmony person would appreciate distorted music because the riffs play the main part (megadeth, metallica). On the other hand though Iron maiden focuses on melodies. There is no universal set of H/M/R for any genre actually.
I don’t think this is exactly the reason people like or hate certain music, maybe it plays a part but I think there are other faucets to this such as the aesthetic of the genre, the history, the message and how it’s musicked. This is why a lot of people of who like hip hop, don’t like James Brown. Both rhythmic kinds of music but completely different aesthetics. Atleast that’s what I think.
Alot of hip hop lovers today, can't stand old school hip hop from the 70s & 80s. Many have said it may as well be a different music. But old school Hip Hop is alot closer to James Brown's music. Hip Hop today has way simpler beats in it, less funky but a simpler aesthetic for more complex rhyming styles. This is exactly the same as "Model or Harmonic Jazz" turned into "Free Jazz". When Jazz was more Harmonic, people liked it better, but when Free Jazz came along, even the older jazz musicians hated it. This is how HipHop will be viewed in the future. Rhyming styles that don't start or stop on the beat will sound abstract to them. So exactly like people have done to Jazz, they will also do with HIPHOP. (What will they do?), they will throw the baby out with the bath-water and say "I hate HipHop". Thats why understanding many genre's of music is (I feel), quite important. To appreciate many genre's of music, is to appreciate the many types (& diversity's) of people's and culture's on our planet. Music is all the human expierience and truth can be found in all genre's. Or you could do what I do and say I hate songs, which alienates everyone and makes me laugh. Man I do go on.
If, like in the Mozart example, the melody is mainly used to communicate the emotion, it would be interesting to look at HOW it is doing that. Because melody is a strange "element" in this regards, since its pitches hint at a certain harmony and the tone-sequence is significantly shaped by its rhythm. I would argue, playing the same pitches from the Mozart piece as a sequence of steady eighth notes would not communicate the emotion well. And from my own personal experience, I find I can enjoy pretty much ever KIND of music, but by far not every PIECE of music. And with that distinction in mind, I find that for me different musical genres tend to have different "enjoyment densities", the ratio of pieces I can enjoy versus the number of pieces that exist in that genre. This, of course, is highly subjective, but for this phenomenon, the theory of not being attuned to the correct elements seems not a very good explanation.
Oooohh same!! Honestly I don't think there even exists a genre from which I would not enjoy at least a handful of songs! It's kind of a thing of whether I like the mood of it and if it's at least at the base acceptable technical level (like, horribly mixed vocals are an instant no, muddy sound, you know actual technical shortcomings that aren't style per se). Surely i too see now some bias towards harmony but it's mostly about the song either having interesting progression that keeps me engaged, or a really juicy hook/rhythm etc that I can't get enough of ever... And oh well dumb pretentious lyrics are also smth that leads to disliking, kinda why if it's pop, i mostly just listen to it in foreign languages i can't understand so that I just can't hear how cheesy the lyrics are XD
As for the melodic part of Mozart, think of the melody leaps/steps. If you had the same rhythm but with only 1 note, that would not convey much emotional information either. Rap can do that on the other hand.
Was hoping someone agreed. To add on, I feel that cultural bias, personal bias, timbre, and topic matter are more often is the cause of people's taste in music. For an example, country music is listened to mainly in the country, because it's about country interests despite being very similar to pop based on melody, rhythm, and harmony. Another example is pop using jazz chords. When it's jazz, it's bad, but when you add a poppy melody it's good pop.
That is a very interesting theory. I think it is also worthwhile for you to look into the fact that the types of rhythms, the types of harmonies, and the types of melodies that a person tends to enjoy are usually formulated in their youth (ages 0-20). Most people don't tend to change their musical tastes drastically after this unless they make a concerted effort to do so.
For instance: if someone grew up with jazz their ears might be attuned to music that uses altered dominants, where if someone grew up with baroque music they likely don't understand the meaning/context of an altered dominant in an intuitive sense.
Yes. When people grow up with a specific kind of music, they become really competent at hearing it. My theory is that there are specific ways in which their ear becomes competent, and that the learning does not stop.
I found jazz to be a little more interesting to play after many years of rock playing. Especially at 1 a.m. when the testosterone crowd was getting violent. I found that when we played some jazz tunes, the most rowdy boys would start to get dizzy, swoon, and puke and faint. Such tough guys. Bartenders would appreciate the fact that the cops didn't have to be called. Ahh... the power of music on the middle ear! BTW all but the most dedicated gals left by 10 pm leaving many pheromone males left to do their own toobin.
Totally agree, one style which I cannot abandon, no matter how simple it sounds to my ears now, is 2000's electronic music. Even modern electronic music is way more complex rhythmically(Take any psy trance for example, it uses triplets,galloping rhythms,syncopations,duplets,four-on-the-floor,faster beats to reach the drop,breaks,anticlimactic breakdowns,etc... in a single music), has catchier melodies and while harmony is almost always simple, it also has rich textures coming from more samples, with dubstep having as much different samples as India has spices. However, I still enjoy hearing those simple musics, with square and sawtooth waves with a fat reverb to smooth their harshness and give that "big room" feel.
Exactly what I was thinking. I’m kind of becoming a musical snob when it comes to lyrical content. So I can’t listen to the contemporary pop charts anymore and I suddenly stopped enjoying listening to artists that I used to like a lot while my ear wasn’t focused on the lyrics. But I think there must be some (more or less conscious) sense of choice into this changes of taste, that goes way beyond one’s “musical diet”
@Anne Day I think it is song specific and to be fair the guy indicated as much. But it's easy to explain something in short time by generalizing right. Also, someone else above mentioned that lyrics themselves is something people tune to. For example, I like rock and metal and mostly what makes the songs work for me is the melody and rhythm. The lyrics are often irrelevant to whether a song is good or bad. On the other hand, in seeing hip hop fans react or analyse rock and metal, I notice that they tend to obsess over the lyrical content, read all the lines and ask what does this mean. In doing so, they often miss the point that often it's just about sounding cool, it's not supposed to mean anything deep or meaningfully. Now, to them, they would perceive it as bad because it has weak lyrical meaning. So, that's an example where people can either be tuned to lyrics or not. I also think harshness, distortion or aggression are other aspects that people get tuned to. I see people who only listen to metal, give them a melodic rock song and they perceive it as pop music. Its often bemusing, because it will literally be hard rock. This theory somewhat explains why them listening too much to the same thing warps their sense of musical reality. I can see it going the other way, where people who only ever listen to vhanilla pop will be out off by some aggressive rock or metal vocals.
Finally, I had been looking for theory that explained this phenomenon for months. I mostly listen progressive and art rock and I had a hard time understanding why most people nowadays like hip-hop, almost to the point of becoming a music snob. This really helps me to get what's going on. Maybe I could use it to help me introduce my friends the music I listen to and at the same time and the other way around. Thanks for sharing this theory!
You won't be able to actually appreciate hip hop unless you also learn a bit about the culture and history. This is embedded in the music and is probably the most important aspect of hip hop. Unless you're simply talking about the 'sound' of hip hop which will get you by when listening to mainstream party hip hop but will never get you to actually 'appreciate' the genre.
It might be just because I'm getting old, but I think this explains why a lot of modern popular music is getting samey. The diversity of genres has really diminished since pop music of the 80s/90s (at least that's my perception). As a result I think people get too attuned to a certain style of music and hence it becomes almost self-filtering in to a limited set of genres.
I don't think so, I think the bigger genres overlap more than ever and there are more genres than ever. It's just that mainstream music is pretty boring. But it's always been that way.
Music has actually gotten DRASTICALLY more diverse since the advent of hiphop. If all music sounds the same to you you're probably not listening broadly enough or attentively enough
There is definitely not less genres. Talking just about rock I'm more familiar with, all the old genres (mostly blues influenced rock) are still around, there are tons of bands but a pretty big one is Greta Van Fleet. Alongside that, there's also tons of "new" genres such as math rock, shoegaze, djent etc. Alongside all that, there's also hip hop and EDM which are really big, obviously and there is so much variety in both genres. Really, there will always be more genres than in the past. Just usually not mainstream.
There's way more genres now, it's just that music got scattered due to the internet and younger people just go for what they like. What apoears in charts is just a tiny fraction of it
I had a literature professor who frequently said, "There's no such thing as reading great literature: only rereading." What he meant, of course, was that any great book was far too rich to grasp in just one reading. Maybe this applies to great music as well. Maybe we should all be a little more patient as listeners and be willing to give something more than one chance if it's new or strange to our ears at first.
@@MusicTheoryForGuitar but at the same time some of the greatest songs can also be very simple. You can have someone like Bach compose something very complex and be called a genius. You can equally have someone make a world famous song using 3 or 4 basic chords and they could also be called a genius. Also, most complex songs that need multiple listens are unlikely to be hits. I think scientifically, it has been shown that people literally form opinions on music literally within the first 10 seconds. Spotify has song skip statistics and it's scary. Something like 20% skip after 10 secs, 20% after 30 secs, and another 20% after 1 min. This data is why pop songs are getting shorter and shorter over time. Another contributing factor is the shorter the song this increases the theoretical number of streams per hour. Thus, boosting potential revenue per hour.
@@satsumaking4635 Yeah, the art "we" produce is a reflexion of the society we live in. I remember I saw somewhere that people nowdays don't have as much free time as they had before the last century. The last century, publicity became much more studied (not that people weren't influenced by propaganda before), and, because of the internet, now we're much more globilized, meaning, more homogenous, meaning opinions on what is likeable or not are more or less the same among the majority. People that like jazz, usually don't like only for the music, but it's where they create their identity. It's where they can say that they like something that not everybody likes. Of course, you can like only for the sound. If you have to listen a couple of times to like it, it's because you WANT to like it. No shame in not liking and no shame in liking. For me, jazz is fancy noise that I don't botter transforming it into fancy music. Music is pattern recognition in noise, and the pattern recognition is in our heads. The music is in our heads. No difference in beying complicated or not. Though, the plesure we get from understanding something complicated is greater than understanding something simple. We like the reward from the work we do to understand something complicated, and the reward for understanding either. That's what their trying to say...anyway, this subject is bullshit. It's a way to validate their taste and themselves among other people....I'm gonna listen to a dumb, pop song now, and I'm gonna LOVE IT and explain with ten reasons why I love it and everyone should give it a shot, or two, three shots!!! (I hate pop, but you get the idea)......(I hate jazz too...that weird one...anyway).
I agree 100% with your theory. I used to mainly listen to classic rock, funk, rap - A lot of rhythm based music. I went to listen to the samples from some of my favourite rap tunes and it was usually jazz, but I found I had a hard time getting into it, besides the bit that was sampled. Also I wanted to get into jazz because so many people would rave about Miles Davis, Coltrane, Monk etc. So I would listen to their albums and end up feeling unimpressed from what I heard (besides the technical ability). So I absorbed myself in Bebop, Modal jazz, contemporary jazz along with all my rap/funk stuff and I have found my level of harmonic/Rhythmic intensity I can withstand has increased massively. So I recommend things to people thinking, "This has a crazy groove and wavy chord progression, they've got to like it", at which point i recieve the comment "That's really Jazzy" with not much more thought to what im showing them. I am disappointed but I can recognise that I was in there position once, and you need to go slow or you won't find many redeeming qualities about the new music you're interested in.
Learning to love a new kind of music is amazing. I forced myself to listen to modest mouse for a few weeks cause I didn’t like them at all but I had loved “float on” by them for years and I finally came around and I love al their music now so much. I started to feel the emotion they were conveying through the tone of voice and the guitars and the rhythms and now I can’t get enough it was totally worth it!!
As someone who likes Jazz (at least the freer styles), I feel it's one of the easier genres to guess why some people don't like it. It's not meant for passive listening. Many people like to just put something on in the background for noise, which is why many technically "simplistic" styles are popular; you can just put it on and casually listen without thinking about it. Many Jazz styles require active listening to really "hear" the music.
I think it's similar with movies. There are people who like to watch movies while checking instagram and just watching it for the effects and action. There are also people who watch movies and try to analyze them and understand them completely. So one group chooses hollow action movies and the other group chooses psychological movies and so on. Btw if you like free jazz "The Father, Son And The Holy Ghost" by Trane is impeccable.
That’s literally the same with classical. Some people just put on like Mozart in the background and don’t actively listen to it. They think it’s just like pretentious elevator music and that’s part of why so many people see it as boring or stale.
I have frequently felt that music genres or styles are one of the many cultural experiences that some people have made cliquish and tribal- you are “in” because you have the “correct” way to appreciate that style; and the “deeper” you go the more narrow that group.
Not a sentence out of place. Straight to the point. Examples are entertaining, and have strong contrasts. Great video, overall! Good job! Listened all the way through to the end.
Most audio engineers, myself included, find this paradigm shift early on when mixing and recording. When your ear changes, everything changes. You teach your ears to focus on rhythms, tone, harmony and harmonic saturation, mix structure, etc. All these focuses completely change music in a good and bad way. Old songs I loved growing up were somewhat dull, and classic songs perked my interest based on the artistic and production quality. Now when I hear a song that was put together with effort with a quality production, its hard for me not to appreciate it.
Good, Kamasi Washington is a sort of acoustic fusion, it is more similar to (prog) rock than jazz. The same can be said for Hiromi, she is a sort of acoustic Dream Theater. The next step is trying some jazz with more black rhythm and more dense harmony. Duke Ellington, Monk, Sonny Rollins...
Washington also introduced me to jazz, or helped, along with Major Holley, Slam Stewart, Herbie Hancock, Jeff Parker, etc. All sound drastically different. Never actually sure what type of jazz I'm listening to. Lonnie Smith sounds nothing like Wes Montgomery, who likewise is nothing like George Benson (as far as I can tell). Didn't know there were so many types (bebop, swing, smooth, cool, etc) and don't know what each is like
I think maybe this model applies to small pockets of each group but it doesn’t really account how strongly the social aspect influences people making snap judgments or adherences to music styles. Like modern pop and club music isn’t just “different” it’s geared towards a demographic of people that don’t really even listen to music to experience music but rather the social events that the music is used for. And jazz and classical music are given a monolithic “nerd” status as a comedic prop from a very young age in media and pop entertainment, which puts people in the habit of placing anything remotely similar in a box so we don’t have to think about it.
I must respectfully disagree with part of your comment. I am a pop and club guy. I believe I listen to music the same way as a jazz or classical or whatever. However, I listen different and hear hear differently. A four-chore series can be extremely powerful when mixed with the right lyrics or whatever. That said, socioeconomic often tend to gravitate towards the same music. That’s not an accident. For example, I don’t identify with the themes of country. I don’t know if that makes any sense or is relevant. Just my two cents.
For me, I started to listen and like jazz because it sounded like it was disorganized music but some how it made sense. It was amazing to realize that it was harmonically sound. In essence it made my brain work and was fun to pick at the details as to how the chords worked with each other.
This theory sounds very reasonable to me. Great video. There is practically no music i hate ... well a couple of styles i don't like a lot (i.e. German folk music ...) ... Also, as i was young i was exposed (and exposed myself) to many different types of music, from classic to metal ... and i think all those styles have a quality of their own ... and sometimes it is just a question of situation and mood you are in.
I reckon that the music that is around when you are a little child plays a central role when it comes to the development of your music taste. It also happens with food, you get used to some flavors so when you are older and try some "exotic" food you are likely to reject it unless you are strongly persuaded to "try new stuff, live new experiences" and so on.
When I heard that each note created the harmonic sequence and that the harmonic sequence produced a major triad and that each spoken word created a note that created the harmonic sequence it was a bit of a revelation. It made so much sense why the major triad sounds like home and is the basis for so many songs and musical ideas. Repetiton legitimizes. This is why people listen to the same music over and over without ever expanding their horizons. They never want to leave "home" or that familiarity. Nostalgia is so powerful in music because we attach phases of our life, relationships, memories, and emotions to songs bands and lyrics. I think the truth is the majority of people just don't really care to expand their taste in music even if they had a really easy method to learn to appreciate different music. I would have at one point in my life absolutely considered myself a music snob. Now I'm not defensive or elitest about my taste (anymore) but I am extrodinarily picky despite having a very broad spectrum of styles that I appreciate. If something comes off generic I'll immediately be turned off and if something is too far out of left field them I may not give it enough of a chance to let the repition legitimize or allow an association to be formed With all that being said I think it's possible for the opposite to happen. I think that we can negatively associate aspects of the afformentioned elements that create a style of music as well. The repition may legitimize a hatred in some situations if you will. Songs, bands,even generes, and possibly even aspects of elements of music can be associated with a bad relationship a break up or some other negative life event for example.
Excellent theory, definitely makes sense as I've found I can learn to like a type of music I didn't used to by figuring out what I'm "appreciating" about it. Folk and Country music is about the story the lyrics are telling, EDM is about how the song develops texturally, Thrash Metal is about the intensity and aggression of the riffs, Funk is all about the bass and the beat.... Once I found what the core of the style was and found what I liked about it I could look for more music with those elements. I definitely still either like something or don't right away but I've found in every genre I can find songs or artists I immediately like.
Cool, but even if you seem to listen to many genres, they share a small bias for circular listening strategy. Try to add some classical music to your diet.
This is a really good, simple explainer. It makes me happy to think that I’m not tasteless but simply “tuned” differently and that I can “re-tune” to enjoy all music better!
Brilliant theory.. i think we shouldn't underestimate the music you grow up on, which makes your first preference and future guidance in music.. though you can break our of it, but it tends to be difficult to many people.. thank you for sharing your very valid theory Maestro.
That actually explains a lot ! I'm a guitarist, a singer, and I used to be a hip hop dancer. And I've never been able to answer the question "what is your favourite music" because naturally, I tune differently depending on what I'm doing. Playing guitar tunes me with harmonies (love my chord progressions more than solos), singing tunes me with melody (Don't stop me now is one if my favourite, I used to sing it with an old band if mine), and dancing tunes me to rythms (learned Michael Jackson's "Beat It" dance by myself when I was a child). And the musics I dislike are the ones who have too much or not enough of those three. My favourite songs are those in which melody, rhythm and harmony are balanced, which explains why I like only some artists, but in a wide range of styles. Thank you for putting words on a feeling, that helps 🙂
What contemporary artists do you think have a great approach to their music where melody, harmony, and rhythm are balanced. Also, have their ever been songs that contain less of a certain element( albeit not completely excluding it) while increasing the usage of another? Because there are someone songs I’ve listened that had they included one element it would’ve ruined the entire vibe of a song- for instance I don’t know if you’ve heard J. Cole but in his song Intro to this album 2014 FHD, he doesn’t include a beat( drums) etc but relies on the piano and adlibbing from a saxophone and trumpet which helped convey a story.
@@bumbleeistheequeen4052 No beat doesn't necessarily mean no rythm, to me. In the case of J.Cole, the story seems to me it's conveyed mainly by the harmony that is constantly changing and evolving, the rythm being never clarified. The result is it speaks to my guitarist side, so I love it. My singer side finds it boring, and my dancer side already left the building (Elvis reference 😉). That doesn't make it a bad song, but that makes it a song that speaks only to one part of me. If you want an example of a song that speaks to every part of me, in the spirit of this video (that mentioned pop once), I'm willingly choosing the prototype of a hit pop song : Love yourself by Ed Sheeran (yes, I know it's a Justin Bieber song, but Ed Sheeran style is too strong in it). My guitarist side loves it, because of the sixth in the beginning, and there is three different chord progressions. My singer side loves the melody, which is brilliantly composed to be both simple and able to carry emotion. And for my dancer style, there's definitely a groove in it, provided by the guitar, because if you listen carefully, there is no other instrument in that song (except the trumpet). That's a pop example, I have some others in various different styles like jazz (I wish I knew how it'd feel to be free, Nina Simone), rock (Highway to hell, what can compete with that), soul/rythm'n'blues (Motown and alike, basically). In electronic styles, I loved what Owl City did with his song Fireflies. All those songs and styles speak to me on almost all level, which has or result that there are few songs that I really compleyely dislike
I also came to a similar observation, so compeltely agree with your theory. Also I think you’re a genius at explaining complex things!!! Also from personal experience - my appreciation of music changed, as classical (romantic period) musical training made me enjoy harmony above all. It proves a point that any music is timeless & can be enjoyed by anyone given the right ‘ear training’.
To be honest, this "spectral signature" terminology just made me think how music, any music with pitch, appears at a first glance to break Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Have fun fourier-transforming everything
A big improvement to the theory would be to elaborate on more tastes than in just harmony, melody, or rhythm. For some people sound textures are the main thing, hence why they really like the nostalgia of video game soundtracks or vaporwave, but not any other music that emulates those same basic elements without the subtlety of it sounding 80s or chiptune.
I think the theory is interesting and partially true, but I'd add a couple of elements. The first is that, in many cases, music is not (only) valued based on these properly musical features (harmony, rhythm, melody, timbre,...) but rather as the carrier of a vocal message. In other words, in many cases, music is just the "support" of a "poetic" content (where poetic must be understood in a very wide sense, not in the "snob" sense). I would say that this is the main explanation for the popularity of hip-hop or trap: it's the way an "identity" is musically developed (many songs taking similar characteristic musical features, in general very simple) around a certain kind of message, the accent being in this verbal message. This was already true in the past, with epic poetry in ancient Greece or troubadours in the Middle Ages: remark that in those cases, we mainly retained the texts, and most of the musical content has been lost. The second factor has to with a "rational" or "emotional" approach to music. I have the impression that some people with vast musical education tend to approach music in a very "rational" and "analytical" way, so that music gets judge by the complexity of the musical ideas put into play. Hence people used to "art"/"canonical"/"cultivated" music (I don't like the names of this genre) tend to find most music just too simple and "outdated" (e.g. following very old patterns of tonal music). Similarly with people that listen to jazz. Whereas other people aren't even aware of musical elements, let alone be able to do music analysis, so they don't have this rational judgment and tend to give a bigger place to the emotions or impressions that they get from the music. I don't mean that without musical education you're insensible to melody, rhythm, or harmony, but rather that the way your rational judgment enters into the picture changes.
That is true, but I have little or no music education and I invented the categories (I call them 1,2 and 3) empirically by testing. After 16 years I found that they corresponded loosely to extra European sense of rhythm, ancient counterpoint and modern voice leading and so I started to call them Circular, Horizontal and Vertical. Tommaso mapped to Rhythm, Melody and Harmony, but I assure you, I am ignorant much more that any commenter in this post. I can't even distinguish a major from a minor chord.
Most people are arguing about theoretical details but they are skipping the most important part: the exercise path I suggest in the method. In particular I wanted to select the minimal set of music to listen for expanding our ears and skills. A sort of optimized sampling. It has been three years I don't update the method because practically works so well (at least for me). Example exercise that works so well: every day listen at least at 20 minutes of each one of these three artists: 1) James Brown (for groove) 2) JS Bach (for counterpoint) 3) Alexander Scriabin (for harmony) at the end of the exercise your ability to listen to any kind of music will improve massively and in particular your flexibility, you can jump from Sonic Youth to Brahms, from Iron Maiden to Ornette Coleman, from hip hop to contemporary classical and jazz without any fatigue. Asian music, African music, European music, complex music, easy listening pop without any "trauma" in switching.
Everyone is partially deaf to some kind of music, everyone is a selective listener for some sort of acquired bias. With this training routine you will not be any more.
So I teach a music theory class for teens. I now plan to have a discussion on musical preferences next week and then make them watch this video after. Then discuss again hehe Thank you for the awesome content! I hope we get to develop a way to test your theory via a well-crafted survey with ear test to as many people possible. This would be an epic crossover of music and data science, and I would very much love to help out with this endeavor. Hehe
In the website there are a lot of examples of classification ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/ I use 1,2,3 or X,Y,Z instead of R,M,H but it is the same. Since I invented this stuff and I have a framework to classify stuff, if you want I can help you with the material you want to test with kids. Of course funk/hip hop/classic rock relies belongs usally on first category, ancient classical music to second and modern (after Mozart) classical music and jazz to the third, but every artist or even every record has its signature. More rare is having records that mix the signatures, notable are examples in Beatles and Pink Floyd discography, some albums contain tunes for each kind of listeners.
Usually it is simple, I ear a tune or a music and understand if I feel deep emotional connection. If it is the case I check which one of these three songs I am able to listen and which one annoys me. If I am in tune with Taxman by Beatles I score 1) near the piece. If I am in tune with Sunday Morning by Velvet Underground I score 2). If I am in tune with Airbag by Radiohead I score 3). If I am in tune with more songs I elaborate mixted attributions (13, 23, 12 -- this is rare, 123 -- this is common in blockbusters and evergreens for example Despacito).
For example if your kids are into metal guitarists you can use this test ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/07/2-cacophony-speed-metal-symphony-1-joe.html if there are girls you can try this example with Beyonce, Kate Perry, Taylor Swift ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/06/super-billionaire-routine.html I have even a Britney Spears only training routine ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-britney-routine.html but if you are more into "serious" music I suggest to use this ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/07/le-tre-strategie-di-ascolto.html and there are also pictures that make easier to understand what are the mental process they do when they listen.
Since my idea is that everyone when listens to music performs at least one of the three mental actions (scan for repetition, scan for horizontal developent, scan for simultaneous sounds) I applied to any kind of very popular or even not so important music. I am from Naples and I use to say, you don't need to know music to understand my method: think about Pino Daniele (R or 1), Gigi D'Alessio (M or 2) or Nino D'Angelo (H or 3) Which one do you love or hate? Everyone in my city has a strong opinion about them and so it is easy to understand where you are. Of course, since I am in the H league --- modern and contemporary classical and jazz, I admire Nino D'Angelo and I never listen to the other twos hahaha
You could also use Mozart's Turkish march as an example of music that can appeal all kind of listeners, because it has syncopated rhythms with groovy feel, of course melodic counterpoint and a catchy chord progression. Glenn Gould version has a strong jazz feel: ruclips.net/video/eTZ33EVK3Ug/видео.html An example of RMH at full potential!
I mostly agree with your theory. I think there is a fourth important dividing element: timbre. If you choose a song and play it using different instruments, people are more likely to prefer one version with one particular set of instruments over another, and they may reject some versions entirely, even if the notes (melody, harmony and rhythm) are exactly the same. I see this in electronic music remixes, classical performances using modern or period instruments, video game music (when known pieces are played using old synthesizers or music that was originally written for these synthesizers is upgraded to being performed by bands, orchestras or modern synths), etc. Timbre is one of the main reasons why I don't like specific styles (especially those that sound too harsh - some genres of rock and electronic music), and for some people the harsh timbre is exactly why they like those styles and dislike others. Likewise for soft, soothing timbres.
Hi there, I am the author of the theory :) Complex distorted timbre like electric guitar or synths annoy listeners like me who have a strong vertical approach. Anyway timbre is a good and important variable, but I would say Dynamics too!!!!
@@SuperEricdolphy Oh hi! Certainly, dynamics can affect the preference for specific musical styles (more staccato vs more continuous) and specific sound qualities (no compression for controlled listening environments, soft compression for listening in noisy environments or extreme compression for distortion or unnatural effects). All of these things can be considered desirable or undesirable by different listeners.
@@shindousan Well, I spent almost 16 years loosing my mind to try to understand how many kind of listeners are there. Then in 2018 I reversed the perspective and I told Who cares how many variables and subsets there are: what is the most efficient way to explore the universe of music and learn everything in the shortest amount of time? In 2018 I tried Gamelan, Indian music and Classical music. Then, in early 2020 I put Gamelan and Indian in the same box (R) and split Classical into M and H. Every other kind of music can be put in one of the three subsets or intersections. So in the end, if everyday you practice 3 different music philosophies (no matter the genre) you are confident that you will be a better listener.
@@SuperEricdolphy Impressive. I think you can go deeper and deeper, with complexity reaching unmanageable levels, then feel tempted to go back to simplicity and the essentials. This does not necessarily mean that this is the best answer (maybe yes, maybe not, I don't know). For me, music is the most abstract art form that humans make, so it probably has thousands of properties that attract individuals in different ways. So, maybe we can classify these properties from most significant to least significant and stop at a point that a person (the composer) can deal with, but the composer can also explore the set of "obscure" properties to add spice and interest in the compositions - for many listeners, it wouldn't make a difference, but there is probably an interested niche. The question here would be: why exactly do we want to know what is fundamentally interesting in music? Is the intention learning to produce successful pieces? Or perhaps it is a curiosity about the inner workings of the mind?
@@shindousan For me it was a simple thing, I was a rock fan. A day I woke up and everything seemed noise. I tried to listen to some Karajan/Beethoven stuff and almost fainted.
There is a point important: there is not a one-one genre/listener mapping. In fact you can learn the three skills no matter what is your genre. Rock music is often rhythm, but you can learn counterpoint and harmony if you practice King Crimson and Frank Zappa for example. Classical music is not "pop", but you can use Philip Glass to learn to listen to pop without doing. Jazz is a creole language and it has everything. Take Miles Davis: On the corner (circular), Birth of Cool (horizontal), Nefertiti (vertical) covers everything.
I spend a lot of time helping musicians from varied musical styles and this has forced me to listen in depth to that particular genre. I strongly believe that I have gained a much wider appreciation in the last 10 years as a result. I was definitely stuck in a lane. Great vid
There is a test I use. Try to listen to the first song of the three albums "Taxman" by Beatles, "Sunday morning" by Velvet Underground and Airbag by Radiohead. All the theory, all the method originates from the empirical evidence that these three songs should be listened in three different ways. When you adapt to listen properly to each one of threes something magical happens: you can emotionally respond to anything from Trout mask replica to Berio, from Michael Jackson to Stockhausen...
This is the "original theory" as proposed in early 2020. Good morning, I updated my method about learning how to listen to music and why some people seem to respond differently to different musical genres or to different valuable bands in the same genre or sub-genre. According to some testing that myself and a bunch of friends did during this unfortunate quarantine, the different ways of listening to music that someone can turn on or turn off in some days are related to three distinctive predominant characteristics of the music texture: 1) syncopation (in circular patterns) 2) counterpoint or at least a linear melody 3) chordal harmony where with chordal harmony and counterpoint we are not assuming anything about the context. It could be pentatonics or 12 tone series for the linear melody, or it could be a simple I-IV-V or systematically tritones or clusters for the chordal harmony. Tonal, atonal, modal, it does not make any difference. In particular way I experimented that if someone exercize to recognize and respond to the threes at the same time it is virtually a universal listener: from punk hardcore to Berio, from delta blues to Cecil Taylor every kind of music is easily enjoyable. Not easy to replicate, but achievable after some days of effort but when you are well accustomed for example to listen to 1) James Brown 2) Bach 3) Scriabin you are in this flow-like state. It does not last forever, every morning I have to recover it through 1 hour of selective random listening to music that operates in the three directions. Rock music is a controversial genre, the main variable you are sensitive to is the reason for well known rivalry between bands or subgenres. If you learn to listen to rival subgenres or bands through exposure you are a better listener. Very interesting are for example the cases of 1) Beatles 2) Rolling Stones 3) Who or 1) Metallica 2) Iron Maiden 3) Megadeth or 1) Joe Satriani 2) John Petrucci (Dream theater) 3) Steve Vai or really subtle and almost unexplainable, because it seems to me I am splitting hairs in four 1) Jimi Hendrix 2) Jeff Beck 3) Carlos Santana In a certain sense Hendrix has the mindset of a blues guitarist, Beck of a classical composer, Santana of a mainstream jazz musician. These are three groups of artists that apparently manage the same material and belong to the same subgenre, but in average are better listened the 1 by people who subconsciously respond to syncopation and better hooked by riffs, the 2 by people who respond to linear development of music and better hooked by melodies, the 3 by people who respond to vertical harmony and better hooked by chord progressions. A trained listener has no strong preference between the artists 1,2 and 3 in each peer group.
very interesting. i found i liked all the 1's most, but never would have considered myself more into rhythm than melody or harmony. yet i know i struggle with jazz, so maybe harmony is not my thing. though i know i do definitely appreciate it in many ways. and i love good melody too. i thought the beatles had great melodies and harmonies, so how did you decide to classify them as more rhythm than melody or harmony?
@@nickgerow Mostly empirical. When I am attuned to Mahler and Beethoven very few songs by Beatles are enjoyable. In my system it is not rhythm that distinguish 1 and 2, but African like sense of time and European sense of time. Beatles are riff machines inspired by r&b, blues. Of course they have a sense of melody and Harmony too, and this blends in prog rock albums like Sgt pepper and Abbey road where M and H are more present.
@@nickgerow Take Eleanor Rigby... It seems a string quartet, bit it is not! Violins are used like drums! Otherwise everyone who enjoys this song would spend the rest of the day listening to Brahms sextets or Alban Berg's lyric suite... And this is not the case!
Video game music is 10 times stronger when you have a bond with it. Take for example boss themes, a challenge you often had to try many times to overcome. This makes listening back to it more intense as you remember the struggles. Same with emotional moments. also in movies.
Wonderful, M, H and R for sure! Another aspect is "the story". The lyrics can inform us, put us in a mood, take us to a different place or time, have us identify with something out of our personal experience or remind us of our personal experience. All of this is supported by M, H, and R. For me, the story and the melody tends to be most important.
I agree that this might also be a factor. If a specific song exists with an overarching "agenda" that goes contrary to the listener's beliefs for instance, it's not surprising that they will dislike it even if all the other stuff about it fits their preferences
Dear Tommaso Thank you very much for your expertise and inspiration. The one style that almost completely breaks away from this theory of mutual acceptance and tolerance is rap, which uses mostly no harmony, monotonous, minimal melody, repetitive, predictable drum machine patterns, no musicianship, no musical interaction, only one live component, which is talk and which is rather litterature. Promoting tendentious ideas with the use of sound tracks generated by music computers or robots at a live event is inferior, a deception, often divisive and a far cry from real melody, harmony and rhythm. When musicians and musical interaction are relaced by robots we lose cross-cultural appreciation, respect for people, jobs, human passion, dedication, interaction and love. Instead of experiencing something with a heart beat, that lives and breathes and changes, we end up with a dead, plastic commercial pruduct instead, which is the total oppsite of what it should be. Robots could free us from monotonous work, so that we people can make more live music to find the essential harmony to live together in peace.
Hello again. Allow me to explain the reasons for my previous feedback. In the JB piece, what carries the emotion is the vocal where the rhythm, melody and harmony are the supporting elements. That’s why I mentioned comparing two instrumental pieces would be a more appropriate, imo. But, as you said, this topic could be discussed for ever. I do note that it’s so easy to get hooked on particular elements in music where our main attention will focus on particular parts. Some of what you say rings another bell and reminds me of how, when we are young and more care free, our experience of music intertwines with our youthful life experience and how later in life many will say ‘music ain’t as good as it used to be’ Perhaps people stop listening as the world becomes more complex for them and simply hang on to their early association with music reminding them of their care free youth. I very much enjoy your videos and the way you present them and I learn a lot from your knowledge and perspective of music. 🤠 Ray.
James Brown used to say that everything via a drum, even the vocals are used to convey groove through subtle anticipations and delays. You can hear that kind of syncopated singing in any soul singer, even very popular like Amy Winehouse or Adele. There is a good recent movie with Dan Across (get on up) about James Brown that depicts this theory of everything is a drum.
@@SuperEricdolphy Cheers Antonio. This doesn’t surprise me at all considering the funky rhythmic groove of his music, albeit harmonically simple sometimes even down to only one or two chords. Yet, his vocals (and his personality) were an overriding and powerful element too and I’m sure without them his songs would not have stood up and been the success they were. My point; is that I felt the comparison would have been better explained using instrumental pieces rather than a song v instrumental.
@@rayjayvids Some Philip Glass or Ravi Shankar or African drums would be instrumental examples. Fela Kuti's Zombie is an example too. ruclips.net/video/Qj5x6pbJMyU/видео.html Maceo Parker instrumentals ruclips.net/video/kefeJ70e-jU/видео.html
The idea of switching channels when listening to music, is something I discovered for my own benefit at the age of 15. I learned to appreciate absolutely every style of music the way you explained it. Wonderful and very exciting when listening to something 'new' and analyzing it with fresh ears and an open mind. I find your theory so very nice and I can absolutely relate to it. Like you say - it does take time getting use to this but what a world of music opens up when you learn to listen with 'new ears'. Thank you so much....love your video's! warm greetz,Till
Yes, as a little kid with a set of headphones in the 80's, my favorite "game" was picking out the bass and relating the line to the song as a whole. It was mostly simple pop music, but maybe that approach opened the door to much wider musical horizons later in life (even if my heart still lies with melody over all, haha).
This is an amazing theory. I’ve always grown up in a family that listens to a diverse range of music and never understood how it was that people could reject so much of the music out there. I’m going to experiment a lot with these ideas and see what’s possible, thank you
I must be one of the weird people because I enjoy all styles of music. That doesn't mean I'm in love with absolutely everything that's ever been recorded, but there is plenty of music from every genre and every era that I love. For me to straight up hate your music you almost have to be purposefully un-musical.
Yuup me too. Grew up with a DJ dad and i slept beside his speakers as he was making his songlists. I've listened to a lot of different music after that when i got an actual passion for music.
I’ve arrived at the right time. Recently had a creative difference moment with my fiancé. We both like very similar music (our personal playlist is almost 80% identical ) and met through music endeavors. She kind of identifies with “knowing a lot of good music” and she has a more musical background with childhood band. During Q, I’ve revisited my DAW and started to make a track. Completely “abstract” and I’m having much fun in making it. However, she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t “get it.” Which actually caught me by surprise because I simply couldn’t stop listening to it. There are elements that don’t strum her familiar listening habits. It’s also different from songs I DJ. I’ve DJed for a few years having some success with genuine compliments (I have some great moments n_n) . So I know my taste in music isn’t too far off. We accepted our creative differences. I’m still fired up to finish the song. Looking forward to it! It parallels listeners of predicable and chaotic. It’s what elements we’re “tuning” for. Frequencies and vibrations. ps. I love the additional detail on time-space and Law. Haha, reality is truly amazing. In the ether :) obe
A solid starting point, thanks for that. From my own listening experiences in categories of various "spectral signatures" it seems to me how the music plays with one's expectations plays a huge role in how you like it, and that happens in all 3 spectral channels. Furthermore the degree of how much you like the music to violate your expectations and extrapolations is significant. Depending on personality type and mood one may like to be shaken up and challenged by violated expectations, or calmed down by their fulfillment. Some music may even alternate between both. Guess this borders on music psychology ...
I think it's an interesting theory about the listener's experience. I have two observations: It's incredibly liberating to separate out art from craft. All music requires quite a bit of craft to do well and some people practice that craft VERY well. However, artistically it may or may not speak to me. I can, therefore, respect the craft that goes into particular work without it having an emotional connection to it. I can also respect the influence of an artist and importance in the larger development of music without personally liking that artist. As a good example, watch Rick Beato analyze the production on a number of modern pop songs. He doesn't like the songs very much as things he'd want to listen to, but the production and performance chops (especially the vocal chops, if nothing else) are fantastic. The other big liberation is to realize that your taste can and will change over the course of your life. What speaks to you when you're 18 may not when you're 28 or 48. A good bit of the "snob" aspect comes from tribalism, which I think is something that's quite common for teens and young adults, for whom music preferences are often pretty important parts of their identity. Some groups I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to when I was a teenager are on regular rotation with me now... at the moment I'm listening to some '80s Whitesnake, which I know I wouldn't have touched (or at least be seen touching) back then.
There is more to it. You need to understand the specific elements of a prticular style. No only those three. Timbre is very important here, but also other stilistic choices.
Like a chess grandmaster won't get much from a game with a beginner, many advanced musicians won't get much from simpler genres. I also believe that a lot of opinions on musical genres is because of the social connotation of the music. For example, country music is tied in to the farming culture of the American South, and a lot of Southerners like it. Bluegrass is the same way, but it is also very closely tied to poor Southerners, so a lot of Southerners may like country but not bluegrass if they have a strong distaste for being poor, and a lot of Southerners I know with white collar jobs don't care as much for country music as the blue collar workers. In summary, I think a lot of distaste comes from class and culture
I play jazz guitar in my spare time and I’m drawn to jazz because harmony to me is the most appealing aspect of music. Harmony then melody . Your theory is interesting and I’ve always wondered about people’s preferences . I think people’s personality and variance in the type of brain that they have would cause them to have different preferences.
I think something that could expand this theory is lyricism. A lot of people are trained to listen to the meaning and depth of lyrics, in genres like hip-hip and folk music especially.
This resonates with my own experience. About 2 years ago I started REALLY getting into exploring music, diving through different genres and sub-genres after spending 18 years mostly listening to "classic rock" (ugh). And the idea of "switching channels" is really true. When I'm listening to rap, I often nod my head and pay attention to rhythm and lyrics, while when I'm listening to a folk or baroque pop record I listen closely to the harmony and the melodies more than anything. Is really a matter of putting an active effort to understand the appeal of that style. Great theory!
I watch a lot of 12Tone videos, and he describes 'Orchestral listening' as being able to choose which voices you are paying attention to when listening to a song. I like your way to describe this by abstracting it down to just melody, harmony, and rhythm.
I think listening to a new style (with its resultant and newly different interplay between melody harmony and rhythm) requires a paradigm shift......a fundamental change in approach (a change in previously held underlying musical assumptions.) I had a saxophone pupil who when she started, only understood and loved ragtime. After 3 years of imbibing other styles (many) due to spending lots of time in a multicultural and multistylistic music department, she was playing Milhaud, Bach, pop and jazz. And loving them. It requires a paradigm shift. I once had it. I am a trained classical musician, and at a stage started listening to and totally identifying with jazz. At a certain stage of this process I listened to a Mozart piece (which I knew well), and it made no sense to me at all. Like I was listening to a spoken language which I had never heard before. Scary (since I knew the piece). 6 months later both jazz and classical had settled in my consciousness and both were integrated into my ears, understanding and meaning. Mind and heart. Sometimes it's also about identification. Simon Frith and all that......
Without question, there is a spectrum of styles. It might be easier to move slowly across adjacent styles toward more distant ones. Classical, choral, folk, and pop are very natural for me, but many overtly rhythmic styles took some acclimation for me, and I've still never settled comfortably into jazz.
Ciao Tommaso, I pretty much adhere to your theory (having formulated somewhat similar ideas). I think one thing we might add is development, just as character development makes great narratives, “good music” needs to develop one or more of the elements (rhythmic patterns, melodic ideas, etc) in order to really be interesting. Maybe this goes in what you call complexity of a given channel’s message? Another point perhaps worth investigating is form, though I’m not sure how it’d fit in the scheme of this theory. Cheers!
I grew up in Nashville and my dad was a studio musician who had to be able to play anything style of music thrown at him. Although Nashville is primarily known for country music, ALL kinds of music is produced and recorded there. I grew up listening to a very wide spectrum of music because my dad incessantly practiced it all: rock, pop, country, blues, funk, gospel, bluegrass. My very first exposure most of those genres was as just the guitar par of, say, a bluegrass or gospel tune. I learned to appreciate all genres of music based on their spectral signatures (I really like this term!) because my ear was trained to listen to music this way. I think your video intends to focus on just the intrinsic preferences for music, the music we are viscerally drawn to. I'd expand the theory to at least mention the psychological and cultural components of musical preference that are just as profound and strong as innate preferences. On top of exposure and intrinsically driven exploration (the internal preferences we have for melody, rhythm, harmony, covered in your video), (1) the contexts and environments in which we listen to music (exercising, shopping, at church, in the car, in the shower), (2) personality, general emotional disposition, and mood, (3) peer and family influence, and (4) popularity/social status are also main drivers of musical preference. Excellent video!
The theory is solid, but I'd want to add something important. Rythm is perhaps the trickiest of the three pillars, because there are some kind of ryhtm/time signatures that some people find very hard to appreciate, even while their musical horizon is broad. A personal example: I cannot much digest reggae because there's something that grates me with up-tempo/upbeat rythm.
Maybe, complex time signatures as used in Indian music can be really hard to appreciate if you're not used to it, and I alway hated Jungle because it's so harsh. But much of the harmony used in Jazz is really hard to listen to if you're only used to Pop, even a simple major seven sounds dissonant to many people.
In fact the best way to learn my system is listening to very far and distant music. Real African or Indian music for the circular strategy, Renaissance polyphony for horizontal, post romantic piano or 12 tone for vertical.
After watching the video, I agree with everything you've said. There's no "but" to what I'm about to say, as I don't believe anything should be taken away or that you've missed something with this theory. Boiling music down to these three elements is a huge step in the framework to this budding theory. I'll add the word "and" to my original statement because there's something needed to complete the framework. One commenter said Timbre could be added, and I think there's real merit in that. I would add Mood to the framework. Someone would have to boil down what Mood means as it applies to music, but that shouldn't be too hard. Great video. I've subscribed to hear more of what you have to say on the matter.
I think Metal would definitely fall more toward rhythm, it’s incredibly common for metal to not have melody at all (screamed vocals, chug guitars, etc.)
i was thinking the same, but heavy metal especially NWOBH is melody-focused. the rhythm-driven style of metal primarily emerged into prominence since the dawn of modern metal, especially in death and progressive subgenres. aaaand, you got to admit that the gateway artists (to a lot of people trying to get on metal) dont fall on death or progressive subgenres, as theyre probably preoccupied with catchy heavy metal riffs instead. yeah, it's a gross generalization to enclose the entirety of metal into a single categorical item, but that would probably sound too snobby for non-metal listeners (ie metalheads being elitistic pricks again)... definitely not the impression he wants to make out of himself
This is the very best video about music I've seen in my hole life. As a music producer it shines so much light on what I like, what I don't and why some of my songs make such a positive impact in people's lives.
Such an eye opening theory. I like to think that there can be other elements that make up the musical 'signature' like tembre as you suggested and also things like dancibility and tempo (might be what attracts people to genres such as EDM)
This is a great theory! I feel so understood somehow in how long it takes me to get into new styles. Now also understand why all my jazz-listening friends say things like OOH SUS4 when watching a movie with a good score. I often don't hear it, I appear to be more rhythm/melody oriented haha.
I love this theory-- it's all a matter of what perspective you are approaching the music from. Others have mentioned this already but I feel like texture/timbre could be another influencing element that fits into the framework as well, as it tends to vary dramatically between genres (solo guitar + vocals vs chiptune vs symphony orchestra, just as a few examples).
I love making music and that's why, in my opinion, it helps me with listening to different genres. I can enjoy harmony heavy jazz and rhythmic hip hop at the same time, cuz I'm always trying to hear something new, learn a few tricks to be able to create more interesting music on my own.
I used to get into unfamiliar genres by listening to an album that had elements I already liked and eventually I would grow an appreciation for other elements of the genre
There is something here with this theory. I suspect the Titans of each genre have additional clues. Metallica is not James Brown but I find some James Brown to be tremendously good despite being a metal head for decades. Kool and the Gang same deal. And I hate most of the European metal that focuses on melody or newer metal like Limp Biskut. I have given them their chance. I prefer the intensity from America. I suspect you hit the nail on the head with the three elements. Much more challenging is how to develop intensity. I think the timbre element is more important than you acknowledge. A contrabassoon playing the lowest C sounds very metal to me. It has been put with Metallica and Dimmu Borgir and Emperor without issue. A band like Evanescence just wails away without even the intensity of a James Brown song. So yeah. I think it’s definitely on the mark, the real key is helping a listener understand what they are hearing because I don’t care about modal music. I really don’t. But I’m interested in what I’m interested in. Slim Shady... it’s surprising what made the cut to my ears. But I’m sure there is a pattern and focusing on what I enjoy is the way to more, because metal isn’t the only thing I enjoy.
Hey Tommaso, I must say as musician mainly playing guitar I am thankful for all these different music styles which are so interesting to study and helping you as a musician to develop you own style and own sound. Seriously said: “I love most of these different music styles as most of them are transporting a certain kind of feeling” Starting with simple songs as lullabies crossing Punk, Disco, Grunge, Pop passing Rock and Country music and finally reaching the highly complex and sophisticated Classic and Jazz music. I love them all. As a musician you always listen differently because you mostly can figure out what each instrument is playing! Great to see how you analysed it. Thanks for sharing! Thumbs up as always! ;)
I agree...nd in case some people may not know ...in indian classical music (both north indian and Carnatic) there is no concept of harmony..they play ragas(melodic quantum which has the same essence throughout the composition)...nd no concept of chords...but it sounds absolutely divine...
I enjoy a variety of music styles. The thing that can be a turn off for me is modern production techniques. Stuff like samples, loops, quantization, auto tune, super compressed mixes with no dynamics. I feel like it sucks the life out of music.
At their most basic, analog is a far superior quality sound to digital. The waves have real curves like how we hear sounds naturally. Whereas digital is all 1's and 0's, and essentially a staircase. Similar to how a digital photograph is pixelated.
Samples and loops etc doesn’t have to be boring, that’s a function of the producer. Quantisation IS a problem and hyper compression in mastering sucks too! Even the most extreme grindcore band needs dynamics. The best drum performance is human.
@@aylbdrmadison1051 Samples can be awesome used in the right way. Excessive use of quantization does kill feel though. With regards to digital, if the step sizes are too small for your ear / brain to detect it's irrelevant.
Well, with the method you can learn to listen to everything, but it does not mean that everything is the same. You can "read" every message, but the deepness is different. Reggaeton and trap can be less annoying after my training, but not so interesting :)
Interesting video ! Jazz people tend to be condescending about folk music especially, referring to it as 'hillbilly music' and this is often said of country music as well...the truth is that Country and Western Music is an amalgamation of music played by people in the areas away from the urban centres and the Western Swing of places like Texas which is actually quite a sophisticated style of music rhythmically and harmonically using guitares fiddles and banjo's drums double basses pedal steel guitars etc.and also Western Swing music draws heavily on blues music and therefore Country and Western music is a broad pallette which sounds simple until you try to play it..Metal music very often draws upon the European classicalm tradition as seen througn the work of Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen as well as Ritchie Blackmore who draws upon elements such as Beethoven and music from the middle ages and the rennaissance [20thy Century Greensleaves for example].
The official training records are James Brown - Live at home with his bad self 2019 mix (Augusta 1969) Glenn Gould - Bach Goldberg variations 1955 La Salle Quartet - Arnold Schoenberg Transfigured Night, Op.4, String Trio, Op.45 DG 1984 The routine I use is instead 1) Jimi Hendrix - Band of Gypsys - side A (Who knows, Machine Gun) 2) Quartetto italiano - Beethoven - Grosse fuge op.133 3) Maurizio Pollini - Prokofiev - Piano sonata 7 A balanced training (HRM balanced) is Daft Punk - Random access memories Miles Davis - Kind of blue Ornette Coleman - Skies of America
![This Is Why MODES Are So Confusing To Guitar Players [Music Theory]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8z_MwotLh1M/mqdefault.jpg)
And if you haven't heard it yet... read the story of Little Adolphe Sax and the not-so-competent time travellers in the description of the video. It's relevant ;-)
Also have a look at Antonio's videos:
ruclips.net/video/dlBRJbbCoSE/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/CTnuzK-YOxU/видео.html
I need to wash your brain and bring you to the piano gang. I would love to see your course, applied to the piano.
I have some pianists among my students. It really depends on your goals. If you are interested, let's continue this conversation through email to not clog this comment section. Tommaso@musictheoryforguitar.com
@@MusicTheoryForGuitar : Is it okay if I wasn't offended? ^-^
Edit: That was in response to the video, reading the story now, apologies...
That's a hilarious and poignant story, lols. I'm fairly certain that the snobs are why a lot of people don't like jazz. But I've seen some of this snobbery in every genre too. It's never pretty.
Yup. Snobs are party poopers.
@@MusicTheoryForGuitar Steven Fry's 3rd novel, "Making History" is pertinent to the idea of the time-travelling Jazz haters... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_History_(novel)
"It's not the music's fault, it's literally *YOUR* fault."
what a legend
The famous italian composer Luciano Berio once told that music in an art in which three persons contribute actively: the composer, the performer and the listener!
Yeah, because doing exercises like this you can recover! ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/06/sex-machine-preludio-e-fuga-in-c-sharp.html
Except when its about pop music.
@@varunsathya696 And here comes the music snob
ruclips.net/video/9AiNZb6b1MI/видео.html
Melody. Harmony. Rythem. Long ago, the three elements of music lived together in peace. Then everything changed when the snob listeners attacked.
Only the Avatar, master of all music theory could stop them. But when the world needed him most, he vanished.
HAHAHA THIS IS GENIUS!
I think it should be melody, harmony, rhythm, and lyrics.
@@hi_mynameis76 Lyrics aren't an element of music. Lyrics are poetry. Sung music is a fusion of poetry and music.
Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Lyrical Themes, Texture, Dynamic Range, Composition. As well as the subtle nuances found in every genre.
@@asukalangleysoryu6695 well, darn. You got me there.
Once I learn to like every kind of music I will be unstoppable...
You can actually do it in about one hour of training. The first time it could be painful. I am a natural vertical listener, every sound on distorted guitar for example is noise to my ears if I don't train to relax the "vertical" thinking. Here's the official video course ruclips.net/video/PFRKBYq7_lw/видео.html
You can learn to like everything...doesn't mean you should, and doesn't mean shouldn't
@@SuperEricdolphy I can't quite pin in my mind what "vertical listening" is. Maybe you mention in a different thread here. Can you give a quick definition, or a link?
@@EarleMonroe Schumann piano sonatas xD
@@EarleMonroe in the website you find some explanations ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/07/le-tre-strategie-di-ascolto.html
“I’m going to offend each and everyone of you”... dude, I really mean it, you’re awesome! 😅
ruclips.net/video/9AiNZb6b1MI/видео.html
I was a little disappointed that I didn't get offended. Now I feel left out. Video is pretty cool.
I'll try better next time😁
😂😂😂
You're pretty stupid. (It may not have been from him, but now you have been offended.)
@@trombonetribute6433 , thanks, I needed that.
@@everettsmith6788 I love you
"I play in an Art-Rock band"
"Ohhh! Is it, like, Jazz?"
"Yeah...except it's, like, not".
Art-Rock is jazz in its song composition.
jazz without them CHORDS
@@anacetmusic rock for people with an inferiority complex
I would call Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock art rock. You'll here jazz, but like... not
@@juliussw9153 Lmao exactly
When I got into buying music in 2014, I made a point of buying 4 or 5 albums at a time, each in a different genre, that way it wouldn't be too same sounding to my ears. So I would get Gwen Stefani, Genesis, Pearl Jam, David Bowie, and Keiko Matsui, and that would be different enough for my ears. But I do notice that I naturally go for more melodic and rhythmic music over harmonic music. I have a hard time with jazz in general, but jazz fusion, smooth jazz, or bebop don't bother me as much, probably because those styles put more emphasis on melody and rhythm. If i can't catch the melody or rhythm, I tend not to like the music even if I find it technically and musically impressive.
Interesting point. While appreciating music that pushes the boundaries of mainstream I too gravitate toward melody and rhythm. They can be non mainstream band music by the way but lately I've found there is a cross pollination from style to style in the mainstream. A really cool example of this was Nirvana and their use of heavy guitars. Modern bands tend to look back to eras where simplicity in melody and rhythm were the key. I'm sorry I'm raving.
Question for you sir: do you happen to like heavy metal? Cause for me heavy metal is mostly melodic and rhythmic. There are other types of metal, but heavy metal for the most part I would classify like this.
@@DerikHendric I love heavy metal. I didn't used to listen to it that often, but over the past 2 years I've really gotten into it (thanks to RUclipsr Razorfist). The same thing with early grunge music. Alice in Chains 'Would' is a perfect example of the sound I love.
@@JustSomeGuy and that's the "taste in music" theory working! You should be more of a melodic/rhythmic person.
You could try to listen to some Dream Theater songs.
Dance of eternity has more complex rhythms and harmonies. I'd love to know you thoughts about this song!
But what do you know? You're just some guy. 😉
Maybe it can be extended to timbre as well, for example people who don't like Billie Eilish, usually don't like her music because of her vocal style and sound, not because of the composition itself
Yes, and the same goes for another styles like metal, that is mostly based in a loud and heavy sounding, or rap, which is driven by the voice and flow of the artist.
@@LucasNicolau-ys4kk metal isnt based on that
@@vitorhugo1560
So, how many bands don't use distortion in Metal ?
It's mainly based on the heavy effect of the distortion (without generalized)
@@neverending7949 its not only based on that. Theres a lot of cool things in metal, i heard a group use pianos and lot of things like that. Just go in the metal category on spotify or whatever you listen music on, and try to find new metal music, other artists, or stuff like that. You'll see nice and interesting things for sure
@@Olivier81961 i agree. With all the subgenres of metal, no 2 are exactly the same. Some bands don't even use distortion.
this actually makes so much sense holy shit
Thank you. If you want to make some practice visit my answer to this video :) ruclips.net/video/PFRKBYq7_lw/видео.html
Leaving a comment to feed the algorithm because this vid is great
Thanks! :)
Thank you! Share this video!
H
As a former snob who hated pop music, I have found that listening to pop has become much more gratifying when I focus on the timbral element, because there can be a lot of production elements that satisfy my need for complexity in some form. Modern pop has a ridiculous amount of sonic layering and new synthesized sounds, and the more I learn about how those things work, the more interested I become in it (also, it doesn't have to always be layered to hell and back: sometimes producers take minimalist approaches to timbre and fill space in a very efficient way, which is also interesting and engaging).
I completely agree with what you said, but that's also how I would explain why I don't like pop. They do put a lot of emphasis on filling the spectrum efficiently and creating new sounds, tweaking little parameters to make things "just right", but they completely abandon all other elements of the music, especially harmony. I'm not a big fan of jazz, but harmony is very important to me in music, but most pop uses the same chord progression, when they could have spent literally just 10 minutes coming up with something a bit better than Am F C G. I just view it as lazy and unoriginal
Yeah pop still sucks
And always will
@@MozartJunior22 exactly, there's literally no musical knowledge required to make a pop song. Just shout at the mic and let autotune do the job, then just put the 4 chords on loop. Voila! You have an entire genre.
@@MozartJunior22 melodies in pop can be very band and repetitive too.
"Jazz is just a Fancy excuse to play all notes wrong"
Kidding... I love jazz, I wish I could understand its harmonic foundations better...
At worst you're only ever one note away from a good note.
Yea, that's not really true, lols. Wish I understood it much better too. But learning a little more each day is helping.
To quote Robert Fripp: "There are no mistakes, only new parts."
Thanks Tommaso and friends for the wonderful chats here. This is a rare place in social networks where our love for art overcomes all hatred and stupidity.
Love you all! ♥️
In jazz the is no wrong notes only wrong timing and believe me i have mastered it.
@@jarrilaurila I'm terrible in timing too, maybe my fate is to live as a jazz consumer, not producer 😂
Great video! It reminds of when I was a grad student-I am a country music fan and had gotten tired of people saying how “corny” the songs were. I wrote a paper that compared the stories in opera and country music. Guess which was cornier. I called the paper “It ain’t worth a dang if it ain’t got that twang.” Thanks for the enlightening video!
HAHAHA this is great! You happen to have a copy of that paper around? I'd love to read it!
It would be very interesting to read that paper.
operas often have corny stories lol
Well I mean cornyness is also not some objective thing, it seems kind of biased to me to reason that opera is more corny than country when you're a country fan. As corny is a negative quality, you will naturally gravitate to listening to music that does not sound corny to you. Im curious how you defined cornyness in your paper.
@@SKIllEXable I don't like either, but I do think that Oprah is cornier
To be honest, I observe that most people like music not for any intrinsic feature of the composition but because they have formed a bond with the experience of listening a piece... as in many friends listening a particular type of music and wanting to communicate with them better, or a person that the listener admires or looks up to recommending a particular kind of music... as well as just habit, i.e. that music genre being available at the time.
I like this framework a lot - I think I would add the importance of approaching music with a sense of openness.
When listening to a piece of music, instead of determining whether you like it or not, try to determine what aspects (harmonic, rhythmic or melodic) are interesting - what is it that people like about this piece of music. All styles of music become more interesting if you can cultivate a curiosity about them.
Separately, a "Music Snob" is defined as much (if not more!) by the music they don't like as the music they do - this should be anathema to anyone who claims to love music.
In fact the tests I do to understand a listener perceptions are negative... M and H sometimes love some artists both, but for example a M listener can tolerate Hendrix, a H listener would be overwhelmed by distortion and hate it.
I think that a Harmony person would appreciate distorted music because the riffs play the main part (megadeth, metallica). On the other hand though Iron maiden focuses on melodies. There is no universal set of H/M/R for any genre actually.
@@kubaurbanski4388 True
I don’t think this is exactly the reason people like or hate certain music, maybe it plays a part but I think there are other faucets to this such as the aesthetic of the genre, the history, the message and how it’s musicked. This is why a lot of people of who like hip hop, don’t like James Brown. Both rhythmic kinds of music but completely different aesthetics. Atleast that’s what I think.
I agree. It’s not only what aspect you listen to but also how.
Yeah that's because there are more elements to music and this only discussed 3
I think many people who like hiphop like jamesbrown
Alot of hip hop lovers today, can't stand old school hip hop from the 70s & 80s. Many have said it may as well be a different music. But old school Hip Hop is alot closer to James Brown's music. Hip Hop today has way simpler beats in it, less funky but a simpler aesthetic for more complex rhyming styles. This is exactly the same as "Model or Harmonic Jazz" turned into "Free Jazz". When Jazz was more Harmonic, people liked it better, but when Free Jazz came along, even the older jazz musicians hated it. This is how HipHop will be viewed in the future. Rhyming styles that don't start or stop on the beat will sound abstract to them. So exactly like people have done to Jazz, they will also do with HIPHOP. (What will they do?), they will throw the baby out with the bath-water and say "I hate HipHop". Thats why understanding many genre's of music is (I feel), quite important. To appreciate many genre's of music, is to appreciate the many types (& diversity's) of people's and culture's on our planet. Music is all the human expierience and truth can be found in all genre's. Or you could do what I do and say I hate songs, which alienates everyone
and makes me laugh. Man I do go on.
Highly agree on the aesthetic of the music
If, like in the Mozart example, the melody is mainly used to communicate the emotion, it would be interesting to look at HOW it is doing that. Because melody is a strange "element" in this regards, since its pitches hint at a certain harmony and the tone-sequence is significantly shaped by its rhythm. I would argue, playing the same pitches from the Mozart piece as a sequence of steady eighth notes would not communicate the emotion well.
And from my own personal experience, I find I can enjoy pretty much ever KIND of music, but by far not every PIECE of music. And with that distinction in mind, I find that for me different musical genres tend to have different "enjoyment densities", the ratio of pieces I can enjoy versus the number of pieces that exist in that genre. This, of course, is highly subjective, but for this phenomenon, the theory of not being attuned to the correct elements seems not a very good explanation.
Oooohh same!! Honestly I don't think there even exists a genre from which I would not enjoy at least a handful of songs! It's kind of a thing of whether I like the mood of it and if it's at least at the base acceptable technical level (like, horribly mixed vocals are an instant no, muddy sound, you know actual technical shortcomings that aren't style per se). Surely i too see now some bias towards harmony but it's mostly about the song either having interesting progression that keeps me engaged, or a really juicy hook/rhythm etc that I can't get enough of ever... And oh well dumb pretentious lyrics are also smth that leads to disliking, kinda why if it's pop, i mostly just listen to it in foreign languages i can't understand so that I just can't hear how cheesy the lyrics are XD
As for the melodic part of Mozart, think of the melody leaps/steps. If you had the same rhythm but with only 1 note, that would not convey much emotional information either. Rap can do that on the other hand.
Was hoping someone agreed. To add on, I feel that cultural bias, personal bias, timbre, and topic matter are more often is the cause of people's taste in music. For an example, country music is listened to mainly in the country, because it's about country interests despite being very similar to pop based on melody, rhythm, and harmony. Another example is pop using jazz chords. When it's jazz, it's bad, but when you add a poppy melody it's good pop.
Tommaso: Metal is mostly melody.
Meshuggah: hold my beer!
Hahahaha true, some metal expecially drone oriented like djent is groovy (R), most hard rock too (Led Zeppelin, Acdc, Gun's 'n' roses)
This is why I like my Meshuggah
Yeah I would think metal is MR rather than just M
Voivod is Hr!
@@SuperEricdolphy exactly!
This channel is going up in my favorite channels tier list.
That is a very interesting theory. I think it is also worthwhile for you to look into the fact that the types of rhythms, the types of harmonies, and the types of melodies that a person tends to enjoy are usually formulated in their youth (ages 0-20). Most people don't tend to change their musical tastes drastically after this unless they make a concerted effort to do so.
For instance: if someone grew up with jazz their ears might be attuned to music that uses altered dominants, where if someone grew up with baroque music they likely don't understand the meaning/context of an altered dominant in an intuitive sense.
Yes. When people grow up with a specific kind of music, they become really competent at hearing it. My theory is that there are specific ways in which their ear becomes competent, and that the learning does not stop.
I found jazz to be a little more interesting to play after many years of rock playing. Especially at 1 a.m. when the testosterone crowd was getting violent. I found that when we played some jazz tunes, the most rowdy boys would start to get dizzy, swoon, and puke and faint. Such tough guys. Bartenders would appreciate the fact that the cops didn't have to be called. Ahh... the power of music on the middle ear! BTW all but the most dedicated gals left by 10 pm leaving many pheromone males left to do their own toobin.
Totally agree, one style which I cannot abandon, no matter how simple it sounds to my ears now, is 2000's electronic music. Even modern electronic music is way more complex rhythmically(Take any psy trance for example, it uses triplets,galloping rhythms,syncopations,duplets,four-on-the-floor,faster beats to reach the drop,breaks,anticlimactic breakdowns,etc... in a single music), has catchier melodies and while harmony is almost always simple, it also has rich textures coming from more samples, with dubstep having as much different samples as India has spices. However, I still enjoy hearing those simple musics, with square and sawtooth waves with a fat reverb to smooth their harshness and give that "big room" feel.
Sistine: so maybe you listen to timbre, and we should add this element to the other 3 elements in the theory.
I’d also posit that there is a lyrical communication axis.
:) Yes you can't imagine how many axes there are. Remember a model, a map is not the real world, but it is something we use to move in the world.
Exactly what I was thinking. I’m kind of becoming a musical snob when it comes to lyrical content. So I can’t listen to the contemporary pop charts anymore and I suddenly stopped enjoying listening to artists that I used to like a lot while my ear wasn’t focused on the lyrics. But I think there must be some (more or less conscious) sense of choice into this changes of taste, that goes way beyond one’s “musical diet”
Yeah, I feel like this was a major omission.
@Anne Day I think it is song specific and to be fair the guy indicated as much. But it's easy to explain something in short time by generalizing right. Also, someone else above mentioned that lyrics themselves is something people tune to. For example, I like rock and metal and mostly what makes the songs work for me is the melody and rhythm. The lyrics are often irrelevant to whether a song is good or bad. On the other hand, in seeing hip hop fans react or analyse rock and metal, I notice that they tend to obsess over the lyrical content, read all the lines and ask what does this mean. In doing so, they often miss the point that often it's just about sounding cool, it's not supposed to mean anything deep or meaningfully. Now, to them, they would perceive it as bad because it has weak lyrical meaning. So, that's an example where people can either be tuned to lyrics or not.
I also think harshness, distortion or aggression are other aspects that people get tuned to. I see people who only listen to metal, give them a melodic rock song and they perceive it as pop music. Its often bemusing, because it will literally be hard rock. This theory somewhat explains why them listening too much to the same thing warps their sense of musical reality. I can see it going the other way, where people who only ever listen to vhanilla pop will be out off by some aggressive rock or metal vocals.
Literally came to the comment section to comment this.
Finally, I had been looking for theory that explained this phenomenon for months. I mostly listen progressive and art rock and I had a hard time understanding why most people nowadays like hip-hop, almost to the point of becoming a music snob. This really helps me to get what's going on. Maybe I could use it to help me introduce my friends the music I listen to and at the same time and the other way around. Thanks for sharing this theory!
Thank you!
You won't be able to actually appreciate hip hop unless you also learn a bit about the culture and history. This is embedded in the music and is probably the most important aspect of hip hop. Unless you're simply talking about the 'sound' of hip hop which will get you by when listening to mainstream party hip hop but will never get you to actually 'appreciate' the genre.
It might be just because I'm getting old, but I think this explains why a lot of modern popular music is getting samey. The diversity of genres has really diminished since pop music of the 80s/90s (at least that's my perception). As a result I think people get too attuned to a certain style of music and hence it becomes almost self-filtering in to a limited set of genres.
I don't think so, I think the bigger genres overlap more than ever and there are more genres than ever. It's just that mainstream music is pretty boring. But it's always been that way.
Music has actually gotten DRASTICALLY more diverse since the advent of hiphop. If all music sounds the same to you you're probably not listening broadly enough or attentively enough
There is definitely not less genres. Talking just about rock I'm more familiar with, all the old genres (mostly blues influenced rock) are still around, there are tons of bands but a pretty big one is Greta Van Fleet. Alongside that, there's also tons of "new" genres such as math rock, shoegaze, djent etc. Alongside all that, there's also hip hop and EDM which are really big, obviously and there is so much variety in both genres. Really, there will always be more genres than in the past. Just usually not mainstream.
There's way more genres now, it's just that music got scattered due to the internet and younger people just go for what they like. What apoears in charts is just a tiny fraction of it
Theres waaayyy more diversity in music now than ever before in my opinion
I had a literature professor who frequently said, "There's no such thing as reading great literature: only rereading." What he meant, of course, was that any great book was far too rich to grasp in just one reading.
Maybe this applies to great music as well. Maybe we should all be a little more patient as listeners and be willing to give something more than one chance if it's new or strange to our ears at first.
That quote is great. It's exactly what I think about music theory too: ruclips.net/video/syZzWauaB94/видео.html
@@MusicTheoryForGuitar but at the same time some of the greatest songs can also be very simple. You can have someone like Bach compose something very complex and be called a genius. You can equally have someone make a world famous song using 3 or 4 basic chords and they could also be called a genius. Also, most complex songs that need multiple listens are unlikely to be hits. I think scientifically, it has been shown that people literally form opinions on music literally within the first 10 seconds. Spotify has song skip statistics and it's scary. Something like 20% skip after 10 secs, 20% after 30 secs, and another 20% after 1 min. This data is why pop songs are getting shorter and shorter over time. Another contributing factor is the shorter the song this increases the theoretical number of streams per hour. Thus, boosting potential revenue per hour.
@@satsumaking4635 Yeah, the art "we" produce is a reflexion of the society we live in. I remember I saw somewhere that people nowdays don't have as much free time as they had before the last century. The last century, publicity became much more studied (not that people weren't influenced by propaganda before), and, because of the internet, now we're much more globilized, meaning, more homogenous, meaning opinions on what is likeable or not are more or less the same among the majority.
People that like jazz, usually don't like only for the music, but it's where they create their identity. It's where they can say that they like something that not everybody likes. Of course, you can like only for the sound.
If you have to listen a couple of times to like it, it's because you WANT to like it. No shame in not liking and no shame in liking.
For me, jazz is fancy noise that I don't botter transforming it into fancy music.
Music is pattern recognition in noise, and the pattern recognition is in our heads. The music is in our heads.
No difference in beying complicated or not. Though, the plesure we get from understanding something complicated is greater than understanding something simple. We like the reward from the work we do to understand something complicated, and the reward for understanding either. That's what their trying to say...anyway, this subject is bullshit. It's a way to validate their taste and themselves among other people....I'm gonna listen to a dumb, pop song now, and I'm gonna LOVE IT and explain with ten reasons why I love it and everyone should give it a shot, or two, three shots!!! (I hate pop, but you get the idea)......(I hate jazz too...that weird one...anyway).
I agree 100% with your theory.
I used to mainly listen to classic rock, funk, rap - A lot of rhythm based music. I went to listen to the samples from some of my favourite rap tunes and it was usually jazz, but I found I had a hard time getting into it, besides the bit that was sampled. Also I wanted to get into jazz because so many people would rave about Miles Davis, Coltrane, Monk etc. So I would listen to their albums and end up feeling unimpressed from what I heard (besides the technical ability).
So I absorbed myself in Bebop, Modal jazz, contemporary jazz along with all my rap/funk stuff and I have found my level of harmonic/Rhythmic intensity I can withstand has increased massively. So I recommend things to people thinking, "This has a crazy groove and wavy chord progression, they've got to like it", at which point i recieve the comment "That's really Jazzy" with not much more thought to what im showing them.
I am disappointed but I can recognise that I was in there position once, and you need to go slow or you won't find many redeeming qualities about the new music you're interested in.
Learning to love a new kind of music is amazing. I forced myself to listen to modest mouse for a few weeks cause I didn’t like them at all but I had loved “float on” by them for years and I finally came around and I love al their music now so much. I started to feel the emotion they were conveying through the tone of voice and the guitars and the rhythms and now I can’t get enough it was totally worth it!!
As someone who likes Jazz (at least the freer styles), I feel it's one of the easier genres to guess why some people don't like it. It's not meant for passive listening. Many people like to just put something on in the background for noise, which is why many technically "simplistic" styles are popular; you can just put it on and casually listen without thinking about it. Many Jazz styles require active listening to really "hear" the music.
I think it's similar with movies. There are people who like to watch movies while checking instagram and just watching it for the effects and action. There are also people who watch movies and try to analyze them and understand them completely. So one group chooses hollow action movies and the other group chooses psychological movies and so on. Btw if you like free jazz "The Father, Son And The Holy Ghost" by Trane is impeccable.
That’s literally the same with classical. Some people just put on like Mozart in the background and don’t actively listen to it. They think it’s just like pretentious elevator music and that’s part of why so many people see it as boring or stale.
Ditto with Progressive Rock.
I have frequently felt that music genres or styles are one of the many cultural experiences that some people have made cliquish and tribal- you are “in” because you have the “correct” way to appreciate that style; and the “deeper” you go the more narrow that group.
Also people ironically don't like hearing the extreme musical tensions prevalent in Jazz - despite living lives full of tension.
Not a sentence out of place. Straight to the point. Examples are entertaining, and have strong contrasts.
Great video, overall!
Good job! Listened all the way through to the end.
Most audio engineers, myself included, find this paradigm shift early on when mixing and recording. When your ear changes, everything changes. You teach your ears to focus on rhythms, tone, harmony and harmonic saturation, mix structure, etc. All these focuses completely change music in a good and bad way. Old songs I loved growing up were somewhat dull, and classic songs perked my interest based on the artistic and production quality. Now when I hear a song that was put together with effort with a quality production, its hard for me not to appreciate it.
I just got started listening to Jazz. Kamasi Washington's album Harmony of Difference is what got me into it.
Good, Kamasi Washington is a sort of acoustic fusion, it is more similar to (prog) rock than jazz. The same can be said for Hiromi, she is a sort of acoustic Dream Theater. The next step is trying some jazz with more black rhythm and more dense harmony. Duke Ellington, Monk, Sonny Rollins...
Washington also introduced me to jazz, or helped, along with Major Holley, Slam Stewart, Herbie Hancock, Jeff Parker, etc.
All sound drastically different. Never actually sure what type of jazz I'm listening to. Lonnie Smith sounds nothing like Wes Montgomery, who likewise is nothing like George Benson (as far as I can tell).
Didn't know there were so many types (bebop, swing, smooth, cool, etc) and don't know what each is like
I feel physical pain when listening to jazz and that's the way I like it. :-)
Correct
Jazz makes me dance
What kind of jazz are you listening to for one thing? And do you feel the same way when you hear metal w with a lot of gutteral singing
I think maybe this model applies to small pockets of each group but it doesn’t really account how strongly the social aspect influences people making snap judgments or adherences to music styles. Like modern pop and club music isn’t just “different” it’s geared towards a demographic of people that don’t really even listen to music to experience music but rather the social events that the music is used for. And jazz and classical music are given a monolithic “nerd” status as a comedic prop from a very young age in media and pop entertainment, which puts people in the habit of placing anything remotely similar in a box so we don’t have to think about it.
I must respectfully disagree with part of your comment. I am a pop and club guy. I believe I listen to music the same way as a jazz or classical or whatever. However, I listen different and hear hear differently. A four-chore series can be extremely powerful when mixed with the right lyrics or whatever. That said, socioeconomic often tend to gravitate towards the same music. That’s not an accident. For example, I don’t identify with the themes of country.
I don’t know if that makes any sense or is relevant. Just my two cents.
I forced myself listened to Dubstep and learned to enjoy much much more music.
i forced myself to listen to classical music and i actually like it
Modern day dubstep is actually really good
What music did you listen to before you tried dubstep?
For me, I started to listen and like jazz because it sounded like it was disorganized music but some how it made sense. It was amazing to realize that it was harmonically sound. In essence it made my brain work and was fun to pick at the details as to how the chords worked with each other.
This theory sounds very reasonable to me. Great video. There is practically no music i hate ... well a couple of styles i don't like a lot (i.e. German folk music ...) ... Also, as i was young i was exposed (and exposed myself) to many different types of music, from classic to metal ... and i think all those styles have a quality of their own ... and sometimes it is just a question of situation and mood you are in.
I now have the video to recommend to folks who say "You listen to noise!". Really amazing video man!
I reckon that the music that is around when you are a little child plays a central role when it comes to the development of your music taste. It also happens with food, you get used to some flavors so when you are older and try some "exotic" food you are likely to reject it unless you are strongly persuaded to "try new stuff, live new experiences" and so on.
When I heard that each note created the harmonic sequence and that the harmonic sequence produced a major triad and that each spoken word created a note that created the harmonic sequence it was a bit of a revelation. It made so much sense why the major triad sounds like home and is the basis for so many songs and musical ideas.
Repetiton legitimizes. This is why people listen to the same music over and over without ever expanding their horizons.
They never want to leave "home" or that familiarity.
Nostalgia is so powerful in music because we attach phases of our life, relationships, memories, and emotions to songs bands and lyrics.
I think the truth is the majority of people just don't really care to expand their taste in music even if they had a really easy method to learn to appreciate different music.
I would have at one point in my life absolutely considered myself a music snob.
Now I'm not defensive or elitest about my taste (anymore) but I am extrodinarily picky despite having a very broad spectrum of styles that I appreciate. If something comes off generic I'll immediately be turned off and if something is too far out of left field them I may not give it enough of a chance to let the repition legitimize or allow an association to be formed
With all that being said I think it's possible for the opposite to happen. I think that we can negatively associate aspects of the afformentioned elements that create a style of music as well. The repition may legitimize a hatred in some situations if you will. Songs, bands,even generes, and possibly even aspects of elements of music can be associated with a bad relationship a break up or some other negative life event for example.
The pieces of pop music usually are songs: I mean they have a lyrics. That's anonther important channel of the communication.
Excellent theory, definitely makes sense as I've found I can learn to like a type of music I didn't used to by figuring out what I'm "appreciating" about it. Folk and Country music is about the story the lyrics are telling, EDM is about how the song develops texturally, Thrash Metal is about the intensity and aggression of the riffs, Funk is all about the bass and the beat.... Once I found what the core of the style was and found what I liked about it I could look for more music with those elements. I definitely still either like something or don't right away but I've found in every genre I can find songs or artists I immediately like.
Cool, but even if you seem to listen to many genres, they share a small bias for circular listening strategy. Try to add some classical music to your diet.
This is a really good, simple explainer. It makes me happy to think that I’m not tasteless but simply “tuned” differently and that I can “re-tune” to enjoy all music better!
Brilliant theory.. i think we shouldn't underestimate the music you grow up on, which makes your first preference and future guidance in music.. though you can break our of it, but it tends to be difficult to many people.. thank you for sharing your very valid theory Maestro.
That actually explains a lot !
I'm a guitarist, a singer, and I used to be a hip hop dancer. And I've never been able to answer the question "what is your favourite music" because naturally, I tune differently depending on what I'm doing. Playing guitar tunes me with harmonies (love my chord progressions more than solos), singing tunes me with melody (Don't stop me now is one if my favourite, I used to sing it with an old band if mine), and dancing tunes me to rythms (learned Michael Jackson's "Beat It" dance by myself when I was a child). And the musics I dislike are the ones who have too much or not enough of those three. My favourite songs are those in which melody, rhythm and harmony are balanced, which explains why I like only some artists, but in a wide range of styles.
Thank you for putting words on a feeling, that helps 🙂
What contemporary artists do you think have a great approach to their music where melody, harmony, and rhythm are balanced. Also, have their ever been songs that contain less of a certain element( albeit not completely excluding it) while increasing the usage of another? Because there are someone songs I’ve listened that had they included one element it would’ve ruined the entire vibe of a song- for instance I don’t know if you’ve heard J. Cole but in his song Intro to this album 2014 FHD, he doesn’t include a beat( drums) etc but relies on the piano and adlibbing from a saxophone and trumpet which helped convey a story.
@@bumbleeistheequeen4052 No beat doesn't necessarily mean no rythm, to me. In the case of J.Cole, the story seems to me it's conveyed mainly by the harmony that is constantly changing and evolving, the rythm being never clarified. The result is it speaks to my guitarist side, so I love it. My singer side finds it boring, and my dancer side already left the building (Elvis reference 😉). That doesn't make it a bad song, but that makes it a song that speaks only to one part of me.
If you want an example of a song that speaks to every part of me, in the spirit of this video (that mentioned pop once), I'm willingly choosing the prototype of a hit pop song : Love yourself by Ed Sheeran (yes, I know it's a Justin Bieber song, but Ed Sheeran style is too strong in it). My guitarist side loves it, because of the sixth in the beginning, and there is three different chord progressions. My singer side loves the melody, which is brilliantly composed to be both simple and able to carry emotion. And for my dancer style, there's definitely a groove in it, provided by the guitar, because if you listen carefully, there is no other instrument in that song (except the trumpet). That's a pop example, I have some others in various different styles like jazz (I wish I knew how it'd feel to be free, Nina Simone), rock (Highway to hell, what can compete with that), soul/rythm'n'blues (Motown and alike, basically). In electronic styles, I loved what Owl City did with his song Fireflies. All those songs and styles speak to me on almost all level, which has or result that there are few songs that I really compleyely dislike
I also came to a similar observation, so compeltely agree with your theory. Also I think you’re a genius at explaining complex things!!!
Also from personal experience - my appreciation of music changed, as classical (romantic period) musical training made me enjoy harmony above all. It proves a point that any music is timeless & can be enjoyed by anyone given the right ‘ear training’.
To be honest, this "spectral signature" terminology just made me think how music, any music with pitch, appears at a first glance to break Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Have fun fourier-transforming everything
A big improvement to the theory would be to elaborate on more tastes than in just harmony, melody, or rhythm. For some people sound textures are the main thing, hence why they really like the nostalgia of video game soundtracks or vaporwave, but not any other music that emulates those same basic elements without the subtlety of it sounding 80s or chiptune.
I think the theory is interesting and partially true, but I'd add a couple of elements.
The first is that, in many cases, music is not (only) valued based on these properly musical features (harmony, rhythm, melody, timbre,...) but rather as the carrier of a vocal message. In other words, in many cases, music is just the "support" of a "poetic" content (where poetic must be understood in a very wide sense, not in the "snob" sense). I would say that this is the main explanation for the popularity of hip-hop or trap: it's the way an "identity" is musically developed (many songs taking similar characteristic musical features, in general very simple) around a certain kind of message, the accent being in this verbal message. This was already true in the past, with epic poetry in ancient Greece or troubadours in the Middle Ages: remark that in those cases, we mainly retained the texts, and most of the musical content has been lost.
The second factor has to with a "rational" or "emotional" approach to music. I have the impression that some people with vast musical education tend to approach music in a very "rational" and "analytical" way, so that music gets judge by the complexity of the musical ideas put into play. Hence people used to "art"/"canonical"/"cultivated" music (I don't like the names of this genre) tend to find most music just too simple and "outdated" (e.g. following very old patterns of tonal music). Similarly with people that listen to jazz. Whereas other people aren't even aware of musical elements, let alone be able to do music analysis, so they don't have this rational judgment and tend to give a bigger place to the emotions or impressions that they get from the music. I don't mean that without musical education you're insensible to melody, rhythm, or harmony, but rather that the way your rational judgment enters into the picture changes.
That is true, but I have little or no music education and I invented the categories (I call them 1,2 and 3) empirically by testing. After 16 years I found that they corresponded loosely to extra European sense of rhythm, ancient counterpoint and modern voice leading and so I started to call them Circular, Horizontal and Vertical. Tommaso mapped to Rhythm, Melody and Harmony, but I assure you, I am ignorant much more that any commenter in this post. I can't even distinguish a major from a minor chord.
Most people are arguing about theoretical details but they are skipping the most important part: the exercise path I suggest in the method. In particular I wanted to select the minimal set of music to listen for expanding our ears and skills. A sort of optimized sampling. It has been three years I don't update the method because practically works so well (at least for me).
Example exercise that works so well: every day listen at least at 20 minutes of each one of these three artists:
1) James Brown (for groove)
2) JS Bach (for counterpoint)
3) Alexander Scriabin (for harmony)
at the end of the exercise your ability to listen to any kind of music will improve massively and in particular your flexibility, you can jump from Sonic Youth to Brahms, from Iron Maiden to Ornette Coleman, from hip hop to contemporary classical and jazz without any fatigue.
Asian music, African music, European music, complex music, easy listening pop without any "trauma" in switching.
Everyone is partially deaf to some kind of music, everyone is a selective listener for some sort of acquired bias. With this training routine you will not be any more.
So I teach a music theory class for teens. I now plan to have a discussion on musical preferences next week and then make them watch this video after. Then discuss again hehe
Thank you for the awesome content! I hope we get to develop a way to test your theory via a well-crafted survey with ear test to as many people possible. This would be an epic crossover of music and data science, and I would very much love to help out with this endeavor. Hehe
In the website there are a lot of examples of classification ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/ I use 1,2,3 or X,Y,Z instead of R,M,H but it is the same. Since I invented this stuff and I have a framework to classify stuff, if you want I can help you with the material you want to test with kids. Of course funk/hip hop/classic rock relies belongs usally on first category, ancient classical music to second and modern (after Mozart) classical music and jazz to the third, but every artist or even every record has its signature. More rare is having records that mix the signatures, notable are examples in Beatles and Pink Floyd discography, some albums contain tunes for each kind of listeners.
Usually it is simple, I ear a tune or a music and understand if I feel deep emotional connection. If it is the case I check which one of these three songs I am able to listen and which one annoys me. If I am in tune with Taxman by Beatles I score 1) near the piece. If I am in tune with Sunday Morning by Velvet Underground I score 2). If I am in tune with Airbag by Radiohead I score 3). If I am in tune with more songs I elaborate mixted attributions (13, 23, 12 -- this is rare, 123 -- this is common in blockbusters and evergreens for example Despacito).
For example if your kids are into metal guitarists you can use this test ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/07/2-cacophony-speed-metal-symphony-1-joe.html if there are girls you can try this example with Beyonce, Kate Perry, Taylor Swift ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/06/super-billionaire-routine.html I have even a Britney Spears only training routine ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-britney-routine.html but if you are more into "serious" music I suggest to use this ascoltaepentiti.blogspot.com/2020/07/le-tre-strategie-di-ascolto.html and there are also pictures that make easier to understand what are the mental process they do when they listen.
Since my idea is that everyone when listens to music performs at least one of the three mental actions (scan for repetition, scan for horizontal developent, scan for simultaneous sounds) I applied to any kind of very popular or even not so important music. I am from Naples and I use to say, you don't need to know music to understand my method: think about Pino Daniele (R or 1), Gigi D'Alessio (M or 2) or Nino D'Angelo (H or 3) Which one do you love or hate? Everyone in my city has a strong opinion about them and so it is easy to understand where you are. Of course, since I am in the H league --- modern and contemporary classical and jazz, I admire Nino D'Angelo and I never listen to the other twos hahaha
You could also use Mozart's Turkish march as an example of music that can appeal all kind of listeners, because it has syncopated rhythms with groovy feel, of course melodic counterpoint and a catchy chord progression. Glenn Gould version has a strong jazz feel: ruclips.net/video/eTZ33EVK3Ug/видео.html An example of RMH at full potential!
I mostly agree with your theory. I think there is a fourth important dividing element: timbre. If you choose a song and play it using different instruments, people are more likely to prefer one version with one particular set of instruments over another, and they may reject some versions entirely, even if the notes (melody, harmony and rhythm) are exactly the same. I see this in electronic music remixes, classical performances using modern or period instruments, video game music (when known pieces are played using old synthesizers or music that was originally written for these synthesizers is upgraded to being performed by bands, orchestras or modern synths), etc. Timbre is one of the main reasons why I don't like specific styles (especially those that sound too harsh - some genres of rock and electronic music), and for some people the harsh timbre is exactly why they like those styles and dislike others. Likewise for soft, soothing timbres.
Hi there, I am the author of the theory :) Complex distorted timbre like electric guitar or synths annoy listeners like me who have a strong vertical approach. Anyway timbre is a good and important variable, but I would say Dynamics too!!!!
@@SuperEricdolphy Oh hi! Certainly, dynamics can affect the preference for specific musical styles (more staccato vs more continuous) and specific sound qualities (no compression for controlled listening environments, soft compression for listening in noisy environments or extreme compression for distortion or unnatural effects). All of these things can be considered desirable or undesirable by different listeners.
@@shindousan Well, I spent almost 16 years loosing my mind to try to understand how many kind of listeners are there. Then in 2018 I reversed the perspective and I told Who cares how many variables and subsets there are: what is the most efficient way to explore the universe of music and learn everything in the shortest amount of time? In 2018 I tried Gamelan, Indian music and Classical music. Then, in early 2020 I put Gamelan and Indian in the same box (R) and split Classical into M and H. Every other kind of music can be put in one of the three subsets or intersections. So in the end, if everyday you practice 3 different music philosophies (no matter the genre) you are confident that you will be a better listener.
@@SuperEricdolphy Impressive. I think you can go deeper and deeper, with complexity reaching unmanageable levels, then feel tempted to go back to simplicity and the essentials. This does not necessarily mean that this is the best answer (maybe yes, maybe not, I don't know). For me, music is the most abstract art form that humans make, so it probably has thousands of properties that attract individuals in different ways. So, maybe we can classify these properties from most significant to least significant and stop at a point that a person (the composer) can deal with, but the composer can also explore the set of "obscure" properties to add spice and interest in the compositions - for many listeners, it wouldn't make a difference, but there is probably an interested niche. The question here would be: why exactly do we want to know what is fundamentally interesting in music? Is the intention learning to produce successful pieces? Or perhaps it is a curiosity about the inner workings of the mind?
@@shindousan For me it was a simple thing, I was a rock fan. A day I woke up and everything seemed noise. I tried to listen to some Karajan/Beethoven stuff and almost fainted.
There is a point important: there is not a one-one genre/listener mapping. In fact you can learn the three skills no matter what is your genre. Rock music is often rhythm, but you can learn counterpoint and harmony if you practice King Crimson and Frank Zappa for example. Classical music is not "pop", but you can use Philip Glass to learn to listen to pop without doing. Jazz is a creole language and it has everything. Take Miles Davis: On the corner (circular), Birth of Cool (horizontal), Nefertiti (vertical) covers everything.
I don't understand why this is in my recommended videos when my 3 favorite genres are jazz, hip hop, and classical in that order
Well, it explains why you might LIKE them too…not just why you might hate them. 😁
I spend a lot of time helping musicians from varied musical styles and this has forced me to listen in depth to that particular genre. I strongly believe that I have gained a much wider appreciation in the last 10 years as a result. I was definitely stuck in a lane. Great vid
There is a test I use. Try to listen to the first song of the three albums "Taxman" by Beatles, "Sunday morning" by Velvet Underground and Airbag by Radiohead. All the theory, all the method originates from the empirical evidence that these three songs should be listened in three different ways. When you adapt to listen properly to each one of threes something magical happens: you can emotionally respond to anything from Trout mask replica to Berio, from Michael Jackson to Stockhausen...
This is the "original theory" as proposed in early 2020.
Good morning,
I updated my method about learning how to listen to music and why some people seem to respond differently to different musical genres or to different valuable bands in the same genre or sub-genre.
According to some testing that myself and a bunch of friends did during this unfortunate quarantine, the different ways of listening to music that someone can turn on or turn off in some days are related to three distinctive predominant characteristics of the music texture:
1) syncopation (in circular patterns)
2) counterpoint or at least a linear melody
3) chordal harmony
where with chordal harmony and counterpoint we are not assuming anything about the context.
It could be pentatonics or 12 tone series for the linear melody, or it could be a simple I-IV-V or systematically tritones or clusters for the chordal harmony. Tonal, atonal, modal, it does not make any difference.
In particular way I experimented that if someone exercize to recognize and respond to the threes at the same time it is virtually a universal listener: from punk hardcore to Berio, from delta blues to Cecil Taylor every kind of music is easily enjoyable.
Not easy to replicate, but achievable after some days of effort but when you are well accustomed for example to listen to
1) James Brown
2) Bach
3) Scriabin
you are in this flow-like state.
It does not last forever, every morning I have to recover it through 1 hour of selective random listening to music that operates in the three directions.
Rock music is a controversial genre, the main variable you are sensitive to is the reason for well known rivalry between bands or subgenres.
If you learn to listen to rival subgenres or bands through exposure you are a better listener.
Very interesting are for example the cases of
1) Beatles
2) Rolling Stones
3) Who
or
1) Metallica
2) Iron Maiden
3) Megadeth
or
1) Joe Satriani
2) John Petrucci (Dream theater)
3) Steve Vai
or really subtle and almost unexplainable, because it seems to me I am splitting hairs in four
1) Jimi Hendrix
2) Jeff Beck
3) Carlos Santana
In a certain sense Hendrix has the mindset of a blues guitarist, Beck of a classical composer, Santana of a mainstream jazz musician.
These are three groups of artists that apparently manage the same material and belong to the same subgenre, but in average are better listened the 1 by people who subconsciously respond to syncopation and better hooked by riffs, the 2 by people who respond to linear development of music and better hooked by melodies, the 3 by people who respond to vertical harmony and better hooked by chord progressions.
A trained listener has no strong preference between the artists 1,2 and 3 in each peer group.
ok boomer
K
very interesting. i found i liked all the 1's most, but never would have considered myself more into rhythm than melody or harmony. yet i know i struggle with jazz, so maybe harmony is not my thing. though i know i do definitely appreciate it in many ways. and i love good melody too. i thought the beatles had great melodies and harmonies, so how did you decide to classify them as more rhythm than melody or harmony?
@@nickgerow Mostly empirical. When I am attuned to Mahler and Beethoven very few songs by Beatles are enjoyable. In my system it is not rhythm that distinguish 1 and 2, but African like sense of time and European sense of time. Beatles are riff machines inspired by r&b, blues. Of course they have a sense of melody and Harmony too, and this blends in prog rock albums like Sgt pepper and Abbey road where M and H are more present.
@@nickgerow Take Eleanor Rigby... It seems a string quartet, bit it is not! Violins are used like drums! Otherwise everyone who enjoys this song would spend the rest of the day listening to Brahms sextets or Alban Berg's lyric suite... And this is not the case!
Video game music is 10 times stronger when you have a bond with it. Take for example boss themes, a challenge you often had to try many times to overcome. This makes listening back to it more intense as you remember the struggles. Same with emotional moments. also in movies.
Wonderful, M, H and R for sure! Another aspect is "the story". The lyrics can inform us, put us in a mood, take us to a different place or time, have us identify with something out of our personal experience or remind us of our personal experience. All of this is supported by M, H, and R. For me, the story and the melody tends to be most important.
I agree that this might also be a factor. If a specific song exists with an overarching "agenda" that goes contrary to the listener's beliefs for instance, it's not surprising that they will dislike it even if all the other stuff about it fits their preferences
Dear Tommaso
Thank you very much for your expertise and inspiration.
The one style that almost completely breaks away
from this theory of mutual acceptance and tolerance
is rap, which uses mostly no harmony, monotonous,
minimal melody, repetitive, predictable drum
machine patterns, no musicianship, no musical
interaction, only one live component, which is talk
and which is rather litterature.
Promoting tendentious ideas with the use of sound tracks
generated by music computers or robots at a live event
is inferior, a deception, often divisive and a far cry from
real melody, harmony and rhythm.
When musicians and musical interaction are relaced by
robots we lose cross-cultural appreciation, respect for
people, jobs, human passion, dedication, interaction and love.
Instead of experiencing something with a heart beat,
that lives and breathes and changes, we end up with
a dead, plastic commercial pruduct instead, which is
the total oppsite of what it should be.
Robots could free us from monotonous work,
so that we people can make more live music
to find the essential harmony to live together
in peace.
I don't hate Jazz, I fear it. With its lack of boundaries
*laughs in fusion*
Hello again.
Allow me to explain the reasons for my previous feedback. In the JB piece, what carries the emotion is the vocal where the rhythm, melody and harmony are the supporting elements. That’s why I mentioned comparing two instrumental pieces would be a more appropriate, imo.
But, as you said, this topic could be discussed for ever. I do note that it’s so easy to get hooked on particular elements in music where our main attention will focus on particular parts.
Some of what you say rings another bell and reminds me of how, when we are young and more care free, our experience of music intertwines with our youthful life experience and how later in life many will say ‘music ain’t as good as it used to be’ Perhaps people stop listening as the world becomes more complex for them and simply hang on to their early association with music reminding them of their care free youth.
I very much enjoy your videos and the way you present them and I learn a lot from your knowledge and perspective of music. 🤠 Ray.
James Brown used to say that everything via a drum, even the vocals are used to convey groove through subtle anticipations and delays. You can hear that kind of syncopated singing in any soul singer, even very popular like Amy Winehouse or Adele. There is a good recent movie with Dan Across (get on up) about James Brown that depicts this theory of everything is a drum.
@@SuperEricdolphy Cheers Antonio. This doesn’t surprise me at all considering the funky rhythmic groove of his music, albeit harmonically simple sometimes even down to only one or two chords. Yet, his vocals (and his personality) were an overriding and powerful element too and I’m sure without them his songs would not have stood up and been the success they were. My point; is that I felt the comparison would have been better explained using instrumental pieces rather than a song v instrumental.
@@rayjayvids Some Philip Glass or Ravi Shankar or African drums would be instrumental examples. Fela Kuti's Zombie is an example too. ruclips.net/video/Qj5x6pbJMyU/видео.html Maceo Parker instrumentals ruclips.net/video/kefeJ70e-jU/видео.html
The idea of switching channels when listening to music, is something I discovered for my own benefit at the age of 15.
I learned to appreciate absolutely every style of music the way you explained it. Wonderful and very exciting when listening to something 'new' and analyzing it with fresh ears and an open mind. I find your theory so very nice and I can absolutely relate to it. Like you say - it does take time getting use to this but what a world of music opens up when you learn to listen with 'new ears'.
Thank you so much....love your video's!
warm greetz,Till
Yes, as a little kid with a set of headphones in the 80's, my favorite "game" was picking out the bass and relating the line to the song as a whole. It was mostly simple pop music, but maybe that approach opened the door to much wider musical horizons later in life (even if my heart still lies with melody over all, haha).
This is an amazing theory. I’ve always grown up in a family that listens to a diverse range of music and never understood how it was that people could reject so much of the music out there. I’m going to experiment a lot with these ideas and see what’s possible, thank you
I must be one of the weird people because I enjoy all styles of music. That doesn't mean I'm in love with absolutely everything that's ever been recorded, but there is plenty of music from every genre and every era that I love. For me to straight up hate your music you almost have to be purposefully un-musical.
I'd ditto that.
Me too
Me too lol
Same here!
Yuup me too. Grew up with a DJ dad and i slept beside his speakers as he was making his songlists. I've listened to a lot of different music after that when i got an actual passion for music.
I’ve arrived at the right time. Recently had a creative difference moment with my fiancé. We both like very similar music (our personal playlist is almost 80% identical ) and met through music endeavors. She kind of identifies with “knowing a lot of good music” and she has a more musical background with childhood band. During Q, I’ve revisited my DAW and started to make a track. Completely “abstract” and I’m having much fun in making it.
However, she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t “get it.” Which actually caught me by surprise because I simply couldn’t stop listening to it. There are elements that don’t strum her familiar listening habits. It’s also different from songs I DJ.
I’ve DJed for a few years having some success with genuine compliments (I have some great moments n_n) . So I know my taste in music isn’t too far off.
We accepted our creative differences. I’m still fired up to finish the song. Looking forward to it! It parallels listeners of predicable and chaotic. It’s what elements we’re “tuning” for. Frequencies and vibrations.
ps. I love the additional detail on time-space and Law. Haha, reality is truly amazing.
In the ether :) obe
A solid starting point, thanks for that. From my own listening experiences in categories of various "spectral signatures" it seems to me how the music plays with one's expectations plays a huge role in how you like it, and that happens in all 3 spectral channels.
Furthermore the degree of how much you like the music to violate your expectations and extrapolations is significant. Depending on personality type and mood one may like to be shaken up and challenged by violated expectations, or calmed down by their fulfillment. Some music may even alternate between both.
Guess this borders on music psychology ...
I think it's an interesting theory about the listener's experience. I have two observations:
It's incredibly liberating to separate out art from craft. All music requires quite a bit of craft to do well and some people practice that craft VERY well. However, artistically it may or may not speak to me. I can, therefore, respect the craft that goes into particular work without it having an emotional connection to it. I can also respect the influence of an artist and importance in the larger development of music without personally liking that artist. As a good example, watch Rick Beato analyze the production on a number of modern pop songs. He doesn't like the songs very much as things he'd want to listen to, but the production and performance chops (especially the vocal chops, if nothing else) are fantastic.
The other big liberation is to realize that your taste can and will change over the course of your life. What speaks to you when you're 18 may not when you're 28 or 48. A good bit of the "snob" aspect comes from tribalism, which I think is something that's quite common for teens and young adults, for whom music preferences are often pretty important parts of their identity. Some groups I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to when I was a teenager are on regular rotation with me now... at the moment I'm listening to some '80s Whitesnake, which I know I wouldn't have touched (or at least be seen touching) back then.
There is more to it. You need to understand the specific elements of a prticular style. No only those three. Timbre is very important here, but also other stilistic choices.
Like a chess grandmaster won't get much from a game with a beginner, many advanced musicians won't get much from simpler genres.
I also believe that a lot of opinions on musical genres is because of the social connotation of the music. For example, country music is tied in to the farming culture of the American South, and a lot of Southerners like it. Bluegrass is the same way, but it is also very closely tied to poor Southerners, so a lot of Southerners may like country but not bluegrass if they have a strong distaste for being poor, and a lot of Southerners I know with white collar jobs don't care as much for country music as the blue collar workers.
In summary, I think a lot of distaste comes from class and culture
I play jazz guitar in my spare time and I’m drawn to jazz because harmony to me is the most appealing aspect of music. Harmony then melody . Your theory is interesting and I’ve always wondered about people’s preferences . I think people’s personality and variance in the type of brain that they have would cause them to have different preferences.
It's important to note that not all music includes all three of melody, harmony and rhythm
For example, rap has no melody
Thank your for the useful lesson!
I think something that could expand this theory is lyricism. A lot of people are trained to listen to the meaning and depth of lyrics, in genres like hip-hip and folk music especially.
This resonates with my own experience. About 2 years ago I started REALLY getting into exploring music, diving through different genres and sub-genres after spending 18 years mostly listening to "classic rock" (ugh). And the idea of "switching channels" is really true. When I'm listening to rap, I often nod my head and pay attention to rhythm and lyrics, while when I'm listening to a folk or baroque pop record I listen closely to the harmony and the melodies more than anything. Is really a matter of putting an active effort to understand the appeal of that style. Great theory!
I watch a lot of 12Tone videos, and he describes 'Orchestral listening' as being able to choose which voices you are paying attention to when listening to a song. I like your way to describe this by abstracting it down to just melody, harmony, and rhythm.
I think listening to a new style (with its resultant and newly different interplay between melody harmony and rhythm) requires a paradigm shift......a fundamental change in approach (a change in previously held underlying musical assumptions.) I had a saxophone pupil who when she started, only understood and loved ragtime. After 3 years of imbibing other styles (many) due to spending lots of time in a multicultural and multistylistic music department, she was playing Milhaud, Bach, pop and jazz. And loving them. It requires a paradigm shift. I once had it. I am a trained classical musician, and at a stage started listening to and totally identifying with jazz. At a certain stage of this process I listened to a Mozart piece (which I knew well), and it made no sense to me at all. Like I was listening to a spoken language which I had never heard before. Scary (since I knew the piece). 6 months later both jazz and classical had settled in my consciousness and both were integrated into my ears, understanding and meaning. Mind and heart. Sometimes it's also about identification. Simon Frith and all that......
Your experience is similar to mine, and is what I would expect based on my theory.
Without question, there is a spectrum of styles. It might be easier to move slowly across adjacent styles toward more distant ones. Classical, choral, folk, and pop are very natural for me, but many overtly rhythmic styles took some acclimation for me, and I've still never settled comfortably into jazz.
I have never read such creative and developed a description, you made a whole scriptural one-man-show beneath your video!
Ciao Tommaso, I pretty much adhere to your theory (having formulated somewhat similar ideas). I think one thing we might add is development, just as character development makes great narratives, “good music” needs to develop one or more of the elements (rhythmic patterns, melodic ideas, etc) in order to really be interesting. Maybe this goes in what you call complexity of a given channel’s message?
Another point perhaps worth investigating is form, though I’m not sure how it’d fit in the scheme of this theory.
Cheers!
I grew up in Nashville and my dad was a studio musician who had to be able to play anything style of music thrown at him. Although Nashville is primarily known for country music, ALL kinds of music is produced and recorded there. I grew up listening to a very wide spectrum of music because my dad incessantly practiced it all: rock, pop, country, blues, funk, gospel, bluegrass. My very first exposure most of those genres was as just the guitar par of, say, a bluegrass or gospel tune. I learned to appreciate all genres of music based on their spectral signatures (I really like this term!) because my ear was trained to listen to music this way.
I think your video intends to focus on just the intrinsic preferences for music, the music we are viscerally drawn to. I'd expand the theory to at least mention the psychological and cultural components of musical preference that are just as profound and strong as innate preferences. On top of exposure and intrinsically driven exploration (the internal preferences we have for melody, rhythm, harmony, covered in your video), (1) the contexts and environments in which we listen to music (exercising, shopping, at church, in the car, in the shower), (2) personality, general emotional disposition, and mood, (3) peer and family influence, and (4) popularity/social status are also main drivers of musical preference.
Excellent video!
Thank you
The theory is solid, but I'd want to add something important. Rythm is perhaps the trickiest of the three pillars, because there are some kind of ryhtm/time signatures that some people find very hard to appreciate, even while their musical horizon is broad.
A personal example: I cannot much digest reggae because there's something that grates me with up-tempo/upbeat rythm.
Maybe, complex time signatures as used in Indian music can be really hard to appreciate if you're not used to it, and I alway hated Jungle because it's so harsh. But much of the harmony used in Jazz is really hard to listen to if you're only used to Pop, even a simple major seven sounds dissonant to many people.
In fact the best way to learn my system is listening to very far and distant music. Real African or Indian music for the circular strategy, Renaissance polyphony for horizontal, post romantic piano or 12 tone for vertical.
After watching the video, I agree with everything you've said. There's no "but" to what I'm about to say, as I don't believe anything should be taken away or that you've missed something with this theory. Boiling music down to these three elements is a huge step in the framework to this budding theory. I'll add the word "and" to my original statement because there's something needed to complete the framework. One commenter said Timbre could be added, and I think there's real merit in that. I would add Mood to the framework. Someone would have to boil down what Mood means as it applies to music, but that shouldn't be too hard.
Great video. I've subscribed to hear more of what you have to say on the matter.
I think Metal would definitely fall more toward rhythm, it’s incredibly common for metal to not have melody at all (screamed vocals, chug guitars, etc.)
i was thinking the same, but heavy metal especially NWOBH is melody-focused. the rhythm-driven style of metal primarily emerged into prominence since the dawn of modern metal, especially in death and progressive subgenres. aaaand, you got to admit that the gateway artists (to a lot of people trying to get on metal) dont fall on death or progressive subgenres, as theyre probably preoccupied with catchy heavy metal riffs instead.
yeah, it's a gross generalization to enclose the entirety of metal into a single categorical item, but that would probably sound too snobby for non-metal listeners (ie metalheads being elitistic pricks again)... definitely not the impression he wants to make out of himself
@@kd013n Prog metal has all the 3 elements in abundance.
This is the very best video about music I've seen in my hole life. As a music producer it shines so much light on what I like, what I don't and why some of my songs make such a positive impact in people's lives.
Such an eye opening theory. I like to think that there can be other elements that make up the musical 'signature' like tembre as you suggested and also things like dancibility and tempo (might be what attracts people to genres such as EDM)
This is really cool. I hope you continue to work on this. It's also a great note for composers in terms of not overwhelming your audience.
This is a great theory! I feel so understood somehow in how long it takes me to get into new styles. Now also understand why all my jazz-listening friends say things like OOH SUS4 when watching a movie with a good score. I often don't hear it, I appear to be more rhythm/melody oriented haha.
I love this theory-- it's all a matter of what perspective you are approaching the music from. Others have mentioned this already but I feel like texture/timbre could be another influencing element that fits into the framework as well, as it tends to vary dramatically between genres (solo guitar + vocals vs chiptune vs symphony orchestra, just as a few examples).
That explains why I could like both classical (guitar mostly) and metal
I was so confused how I could like both. Since they seem like polar opposites.
Most classical has a strong horizontal bias, like most metal. It is about in the first decades of 1800 that classical became vertical.
To keep it simple you like listening to (long) scales
I love making music and that's why, in my opinion, it helps me with listening to different genres. I can enjoy harmony heavy jazz and rhythmic hip hop at the same time, cuz I'm always trying to hear something new, learn a few tricks to be able to create more interesting music on my own.
This guy isn't mentally enlightened, or spiritualy enlightened, he's musically enlightened
I used to get into unfamiliar genres by listening to an album that had elements I already liked and eventually I would grow an appreciation for other elements of the genre
There is something here with this theory. I suspect the Titans of each genre have additional clues. Metallica is not James Brown but I find some James Brown to be tremendously good despite being a metal head for decades. Kool and the Gang same deal. And I hate most of the European metal that focuses on melody or newer metal like Limp Biskut. I have given them their chance. I prefer the intensity from America.
I suspect you hit the nail on the head with the three elements. Much more challenging is how to develop intensity. I think the timbre element is more important than you acknowledge. A contrabassoon playing the lowest C sounds very metal to me. It has been put with Metallica and Dimmu Borgir and Emperor without issue. A band like Evanescence just wails away without even the intensity of a James Brown song.
So yeah. I think it’s definitely on the mark, the real key is helping a listener understand what they are hearing because I don’t care about modal music. I really don’t. But I’m interested in what I’m interested in. Slim Shady... it’s surprising what made the cut to my ears. But I’m sure there is a pattern and focusing on what I enjoy is the way to more, because metal isn’t the only thing I enjoy.
Hey Tommaso, I must say as musician mainly playing guitar I am thankful for all these different music styles which are so interesting to study and helping you as a musician to develop you own style and own sound. Seriously said: “I love most of these different music styles as most of them are transporting a certain kind of feeling” Starting with simple songs as lullabies crossing Punk, Disco, Grunge, Pop passing Rock and Country music and finally reaching the highly complex and sophisticated Classic and Jazz music. I love them all. As a musician you always listen differently because you mostly can figure out what each instrument is playing! Great to see how you analysed it. Thanks for sharing! Thumbs up as always! ;)
This is absolutely mindblowing :0
I agree...nd in case some people may not know ...in indian classical music (both north indian and Carnatic) there is no concept of harmony..they play ragas(melodic quantum which has the same essence throughout the composition)...nd no concept of chords...but it sounds absolutely divine...
Yeah, in my system indian classical music is circular (here R) and it is one of the finest example of this category.
I enjoy a variety of music styles. The thing that can be a turn off for me is modern production techniques. Stuff like samples, loops, quantization, auto tune, super compressed mixes with no dynamics. I feel like it sucks the life out of music.
At their most basic, analog is a far superior quality sound to digital. The waves have real curves like how we hear sounds naturally. Whereas digital is all 1's and 0's, and essentially a staircase. Similar to how a digital photograph is pixelated.
Samples and loops etc doesn’t have to be boring, that’s a function of the producer. Quantisation IS a problem and hyper compression in mastering sucks too! Even the most extreme grindcore band needs dynamics. The best drum performance is human.
@@aylbdrmadison1051 Samples can be awesome used in the right way. Excessive use of quantization does kill feel though.
With regards to digital, if the step sizes are too small for your ear / brain to detect it's irrelevant.
Well, with the method you can learn to listen to everything, but it does not mean that everything is the same. You can "read" every message, but the deepness is different. Reggaeton and trap can be less annoying after my training, but not so interesting :)
I have a soft spot in my heart for quantized rhythms because I think they sound like cute robots.
Interesting video ! Jazz people tend to be condescending about folk music especially, referring to it as 'hillbilly music' and this is often said of country music as well...the truth is that Country and Western Music is an amalgamation of music played by people in the areas away from the urban centres and the Western Swing of places like Texas which is actually quite a sophisticated style of music rhythmically and harmonically using guitares fiddles and banjo's drums double basses pedal steel guitars etc.and also Western Swing music draws heavily on blues music and therefore Country and Western music is a broad pallette which sounds simple until you try to play it..Metal music very often draws upon the European classicalm tradition as seen througn the work of Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen as well as Ritchie Blackmore who draws upon elements such as Beethoven and music from the middle ages and the rennaissance [20thy Century Greensleaves for example].
Thanks a lot for this insight, it makes absolute sense, you help the internet compose better
The official training records are
James Brown - Live at home with his bad self 2019 mix (Augusta 1969)
Glenn Gould - Bach Goldberg variations 1955
La Salle Quartet - Arnold Schoenberg Transfigured Night, Op.4, String Trio, Op.45 DG 1984
The routine I use is instead
1) Jimi Hendrix - Band of Gypsys - side A (Who knows, Machine Gun)
2) Quartetto italiano - Beethoven - Grosse fuge op.133
3) Maurizio Pollini - Prokofiev - Piano sonata 7
A balanced training (HRM balanced) is
Daft Punk - Random access memories
Miles Davis - Kind of blue
Ornette Coleman - Skies of America
And now I listen to Kawai Metal
.... I wonder at what point my genre diversity had gone to far