8Sided Blog

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Decoding a Pocket Symphony

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Posted by the Polyphonic YouTube channel, this video essay illustrates all the remarkable things that happen in the three minutes and thirty-nine seconds that comprise The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” It is remarkable when the details get laid out: the convention-defying sections of the song, the ingenious chord combinations, the metamorphosing moods and transitions, even how the deceptively simple lyrics reveal a deeper meaning. “Good Vibrations” is indeed a “pocket symphony.”

 

Wikipedia:

The making of “Good Vibrations” was unprecedented for any kind of recording, with a total production cost estimated between $50,000 and $75,000 (equivalent to $370,000 and $550,000 in 2016). Building upon the multi-layered approach he had formulated with Pet Sounds, Wilson recorded the song in different sections at four Hollywood studios from February to September 1966, resulting in a cut-up mosaic of several musical episodes marked by disjunctive key and modal shifts. It contained previously untried mixes of instruments, including jaw harp and Electro-Theremin, and it was the first pop hit to have a cello playing juddering rhythms.

Its title derived from Wilson’s fascination with cosmic vibrations, after his mother once told him as a child that dogs sometimes bark at people in response to their “bad vibrations”. He used the concept to suggest extrasensory perception, while Love’s lyrics were inspired by the Flower Power movement that was then burgeoning in Southern California.


The instrument that steals the show in “Good Vibrations” is more often than not mistakenly referred to as a theremin. Kudos to Polyphonic for initially calling the instrument on the recording by its actual name: the Electro-Theremin. He gets it wrong the second time around, though.

From an article about this instrument via NPR:

… in the 1950s, trombonist Paul Tanner and an amateur inventor named Bob Whitsell made an instrument that made sounds similar to Leon Theremin’s creation, but made it a lot simpler for non-experts to hit specific notes and control the volume.

Tanner’s instrument — like the theremin — was used in science fiction films and a very popular television show from the early 1960s called My Favorite Martian. Tanner featured it on his 1958 album, Music for Heavenly Bodies. The few people who bought The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds when it came out in May of 1966 would have heard Tanner’s instrument on the song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” But in the autumn of that year, every American teenager heard that weird sci-fi sound on every AM pop radio station, when Paul Tanner performed his Electro-Theremin with The Beach Boys on “Good Vibrations.”


One more observation: near the end of the video I found myself thinking, “Wow, Brian Wilson did look exactly like Paul Dano.” Then I realized that was Paul Dano. Sneaky.

My Every Day Album Discovery Routine

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I was recently asked, “what are you listening to these days?” I explained that I listen to a lot, and it’s because every day I aim to listen to an album I’ve never heard before

A couple of years ago I was writing a ‘best of’ list and came up short for my top ten favorite albums of that year. I realized I didn’t listen to a lot of new music and that made me feel stale. Of all people, especially in my line of work, I should be on top of what’s new. And one of my most enjoyed pastimes is discovering new music.

I made a pact to listen to an album a day, and one I had not heard before. It doesn’t have to be a ‘new’ album, just new to me. Bonus points if I’m not familiar with the album artist, too. I keep track of my progress by posting the day’s album on my Twitter feed. I’ll often add short commentary and post a link to an informative review or article about the work.

Digital streaming powers this process. Spotify is my personal choice, and the freedom I have to check out and discover new albums is exhilarating. It’s also addictive. And I know your next question: how do I find a new album a day?

I get my money’s worth out of my Spotify subscription fee as I’m using the service almost non-stop. Because of this, Spotify knows my taste well, and its suggestions are usually spot-on. My Discover Weekly playlist is fascinating every time it refreshes. You know the algorithm is doing its job when a song I loved a decade ago but haven’t thought of since pops up. And the Discover tab under Browse yields terrific album choices regularly.

However, I like getting outside of my comfort zone. Spotify’s choices reflect my taste as the algorithm sees it, and that’s cool. But I sometimes want to get outside of my perceived taste and find entirely new (to me) artists and sounds.

So, I pluck titles from the review pages of a few music websites. The ones I regularly visit:

  • The Quietus – I love that the music The Quietus reviews is all over the place. I never know what I’m going to hear.
  • Resident Advisor – Almost always in the electronic spectrum, RA’s album reviews are diverse and filled with treasures, and aren’t as dance floor focused as you might think.
  • Pitchfork – I know I’m not supposed to go here, but this is where I find what’s new in the broader sense. Relatively mainstream albums rub shoulders with underground gems, and I’m willing to sample it all.

I do have a few rules. I grab an album from the bottom of whichever review list I visit. The ones at the top might not be out yet, thus not available for digital streaming. I’ll give any album a chance for two or three songs. If an album doesn’t float my boat, I’m not going to listen to the whole thing. I move on and select a new album when a selection doesn’t satisfy or pique my interest. When I find an album that I’m into enough to finish, I’ll read the review to learn more about it. I’ll also do a quick search for the artist and album to see if there’s anything else I can glean. Then I’ll post it on my pages.

Know that when I post an album on Twitter, it’s mainly for my benefit. I’m keeping a running tab on what I’ve been checking out, and I like to look back to see what made a lasting impression on me. I’ll listen to those again someday, but only after I’ve digested something new. If you, the casual onlooker, consider my postings as recommendations and listen along then I’m flattered.

That’s the process. An album a day. I’ve missed days – in fact, I’ve missed a lot of days lately – as life and travel get in the way. But this has proven to be an enriching practice that I’d like to make into a daily routine. If you also love discovering music, then I’d recommend giving this schtick a try.

Side note: Here I am on Spotify. I don’t make my listening private, so you are welcome to see what I’m checking out in real time. I’m also proud of the playlists I put together and would love for you to give them a go.

Songwriters Getting Paid as the Robots Listen

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There are a few options for businesses to legally play music on premises, whether that business is, say, a nightclub, restaurant, or hair salon. An in-store music service like Mood Media (formerly Muzak) can supply channels of pre-cleared tunes for a subscription fee. These services are like radio in most cases, as the business won’t be able to choose any particular song that’s played. The business could also just play music by friends and enter into a direct licensing agreement with each songwriter. That would be a huge hassle and dramatically limit the available catalog.

The most popular option is to pay for the compulsory licenses offered by the performance rights organizations – PROs like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. These licenses allow the business to play songs represented by each PRO. A few factors determine the fee, such as venue capacity, and the business usually obtains a license from all the PROs. For one thing, it’s a lot of work to determine which PRO represents a song the venue wants to play, and the music customers would like to hear are distributed amongst all the rights organizations. Paying fees to all creates full coverage and the freedom to play whatever you’d like.

A venue’s requirement to get a compulsory license is one of the most misunderstood aspects of music publishing. The venues themselves especially misunderstand this requirement. I’ve spoken to many business owners who don’t understand why they have to pay for such a license. The phrase “it’s nothing but a shakedown” is used on more than one occasion. But the simple fact is this: if your business is profiting off of someone else’s music – and playing music to enhance your business qualifies – then the songwriters should get a cut of some sort.

There is another argument made by business owners that I find harder to dispute. Nightclub owners often argue that the fees they pay to the PROs aren’t going to the songwriters whose songs they are playing. This statement is often true. Presently, the PROs have no way to track the songs played in their licensed venues. The businesses could submit a list of all the songs played in a day, but no one is going to do that. Instead, the PROs pool the collected fees and distribute the royalty to songwriters they assume are the ones getting played the most. In other words, popular songwriters, for the most popular songs.

I can empathize, as I DJ’ed hundreds of times exclusively at underground clubs and very few of the songwriters I played (if any) ever saw a penny. I’ve heard tales of clubs in some territories tackling the problem by having the DJs write down all the songs from their sets. I guess it’s the thought that counts, but this is obviously an unreliable and haphazard solution.

There’s a change coming, though. Advances in audio recognition are making song tracking in venues possible. Using technology popularized by the likes of Shazam, songs get identified and, in turn, the appropriate songwriters paid. From a story in Complete Music Update:

Collecting societies PPL and PRS For Music have confirmed that they are expanding a pilot project to test the use of music recognition technology in clubs, pubs, bars and hotels to monitor what music is being played in those spaces.

Peter Marks {CEO of UK clubbing chain The Deltic Group} has welcomed the pilot, saying: “Music is the very heartbeat of our business and it’s in our interest to see that talented artists are rewarded for their creations. With online streaming and other digital technology, it’s increasingly difficult for songwriters and musicians to make a living from their creations, so anything we can do to help and attract and support the latest local talent has to be a good thing”.

I believe GEMA in Germany has also been testing this out.

The ramifications are enormous and welcome; accurate tracking in venues (and eventually across other outlets such as radio and sporting events) will create a great benefit for non-mainstream songwriters.

It remains to be seen if US PROs might look to adopt this technology. The fact that there are multiple PROs in this country may prove to be a stumbling block. A device that listens, identifies songs, and sends data to the PROs would have to be installed in every participating venue. It would be a hassle if each PRO had its own device for every business to install. Could they agree on one shared device? Part of me thinks it unlikely as the US PROs are fiercely competitive. That said, the recent news of ASCAP and BMI collaborating on a musical works database gives us a glimmer of hope.

The US is often the country left behind when it comes to advances in rights management. Let’s hope our industry is proactive in embracing this technology solution to a longstanding problem.

The Upside of Music Piracy

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For a legacy act, taking a nuanced stance on the effects of music piracy is surprising and somewhat brave. But that’s what Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell is doing in a recent interview with Ultimate Classic Rock:

“The way the band works is quite extraordinary. In recent years, we’ve been really fortunate that we’ve seen this new surge in our popularity. For the most part, that’s fueled by younger people coming to the shows,” Campbell said. “We’ve been seeing it for the last 10, 12 or 15 years, you’d notice younger kids in the audience, but especially in the last couple of years, it’s grown exponentially. I really do believe that this is the upside of music piracy.”


Techdirt has some thoughts:

This is the part of music obtained freely that never gets mentioned: the multiplier effect it has on a bands relevance and longevity. This isn’t to say that such a model works for every band in every instance, but it’s refreshing to see an artist step back and try to get the full picture of what’s really going on here. It would be quite easy for someone like Campbell to see the young faces in his audience and never give a second thought to how those younger fans got to a Def Leppard concert. By taking an intelligent look at that question, however, Campbell has reached a place where he’s found a friend where he might have seen an enemy.


It is extraordinary how attitudes are changing across the board as larger artists begin to find advantage in the new music paradigm. (When it comes to topics like this, I wonder how much influence Bob Lefsetz is having on classic rockers.) The only question I might have: is music piracy still a concern when it comes to younger audiences? Are teenagers and fans in their 20s still downloading files? As statistics show streaming gaining traction at an accelerating rate, one might assume Daniel Ek’s mission to eliminate piracy might be paying off.

Another side of the coin: Def Leppard are active on YouTube and engage on social media, regularly posting new content, which is also rare for a legacy band. Though Campbell’s perspective is refreshing, he may be off-base about the reality of what is mostly driving young fans to his band’s concerts.


Update: Music 3.0 blog also asks Does Music Piracy Still Exist In The Age Of Streaming?

‘Ways of Hearing’ Explores Listening in the Digital Age

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I’m excited about this new Radiotopia podcast named Showcase. Mostly because the first season consists of the six-part series Ways Of Hearing, hosted by Damon Krukowski who you may know as the drummer for Galaxie 500 and a member of Damon & Naomi.

Apparently inspired and culled from Damon’s recent book The New Analog, Ways Of Hearing explores how listening has changed as audio delivery moves from analog to digital. It looks to go much deeper than that, touching on subjects like modern changes in the sharing of information and how audio affects our sense of time. So far the podcast doesn’t go down the tired analog vs. digital rabbit hole, and I don’t expect that it will. Listen to the first episode HERE.

On a side note: certain bands or songs send waves of melancholy down the spine. For me, Galaxie 500 is one of those bands. When “Tugboat” starts playing in the first episode of this podcast I’m overcome with tingles. The song evokes a time and a place, an overwhelming nostalgia, a part of my life (my early 20s) filled with loneliness and sadness. I recorded a Galaxie 500 copycat song, complete with my imitation of Dean Wareham’s first album wail, and played it for a girl I liked. She asked me why I was so sad and then I never heard from her again.

And if you’d like to read the harrowing tale of a great band dissolving then you should check out this oral history of Galaxie 500 on Pitchfork.


Update: If you’re having trouble listening from the player on the show’s site then try this player on PRX’s page.

The Rhythmic Surprise of Syncopation

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Treat yourself to this ten minute explanation of syncopation, using the deceivingly complex rhythmic basis of Radiohead’s “Videotape” as its example. “Videotape” is my favorite of the Radiohead ‘dirge’ songs but what I didn’t realize is that it actually grooves at a very un-dirge-like 155 BPM.

Vox has been on fire with their videos for a while now. I watch them all. Check more of their output HERE.

If You Are Losing the Game, Best to Change the Rules

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Ben Thompson for Stratechery:

The long-rumored competitor to Amazon Echo and Google Home was, fascinatingly, framed as anything but. {Tim} Cook began the unveiling by referencing Apple’s longtime focus on music, and indeed, the first several minutes of the HomePod were entirely about its quality as a speaker. It was, in my estimation, an incredibly smart approach: if you are losing the game, as Siri is to Alexa and Google, best to change the rules, and having heard the HomePod, its sound quality is significantly better than the Amazon Echo (and, one can safely assume, Google Home). Moreover, the ability to link multiple HomePods together is bad news for Sonos in particular (the HomePod sounded significantly better than the Sonos Play 3 as well).

Of course, superior sound quality is what you would expect from a significantly more expensive speaker: the HomePod costs $350, while the Sonos Play 3 is $300, and the Amazon Echo is $150. From Apple’s perspective, though, a high price is a feature, not a bug: remember, the company has a hardware-based business model, which means there needs to be room for a meaningful margin.

The result is a product that, beyond being massively late to market, is inferior to the competition on two of three possible vectors: the HomePod is significantly more expensive than an Echo or Google Home, it has an inferior voice assistant, but it has a better speaker. That is not as bad as it sounds: after all, the iPhone is significantly more expensive than most other smartphones, it has inferior built-in services, but it has a superior user experience otherwise. The difference — and this is why the iPhone is so much more dominant than any other Apple product — is that everyone already needs a phone; the only question is which one. It remains to be seen how many people need a truly impressive speaker.

Coming from a music industry POV, an emphasis on sound quality as a feature – as it applies to music playback – is a great move and may even raise the bar for competitors’ forthcoming hardware. I look forward to personally assessing just how good this HomePod speaker sounds, and find it fascinating that the HomePod has been successfully positioned so that the sound quality is what I’m mostly curious about.

Hitting the Links: Music’s Technological History, Repetitive Pop Lyrics, and Peter Saville

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Technology In Music: A Chronological Playlist Through History:

Let’s start from from the beginning, in 1937: a timeless feel – eerie and alienating at times, permeates ‘Oraison’ by French composer Olivier Messiaen. The song was originally written for an ensemble of early electronic musical keyboards called Ondes Martenot. The Ondes Martenot is a very expressive instrument, meeting Messiaen’s avant-garde composition techniques. If you’re expecting beat drops you may want to keep in mind the release date.



Peter Saville On His Album Cover Artwork:

{Saville on New Order’s Technique cover:} It was a garden ornament and we rented it for the shoot. It’s a very bacchanalian image, which fitted the moment just before the last financial crash and the new drug-fuelled hedonism involved in the music scene. It’s also my first ironic work: all the previous sleeves were in some way idealistic and utopian. I’d had this idea that art and design could make the world a better place. That even bus stops could be better.



Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?:

In 1977, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper called The Complexity of Songs, which is basically one long joke about the repetitive lyrics of newfangled music (example quote: “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced”). I’m going to try to test this hypothesis with data. I’ll be analyzing the repetitiveness of a dataset of 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2017.



Forgotten Tributes: 25 Monumental Relics of Yugoslavia:

If you were to travel today through the area that was once Yugoslavia, you would come across some incredible massive objects that allow an unexpected look directly into the area’s past. Before dissolving into several smaller countries in the 1990s, Yugoslavia became home to a number of large-scale futuristic monuments.



Gary Vaynerchuk on Impact Theory (Podcast):

I think that Steve Jobs came along {and} became an icon, but the sad part of that narrative was he did not treat his employees well. He became an icon and the narrative became he got the most out of people by being a jerk, and that became romanticized. And a lot of people in Silicon Valley today run companies where they’re mean because they think that’s the right thing to do because they put Steve Jobs on a pedestal. I want to become that big {but} what I want to come from that is that kids that aren’t even born today think that they can build a five billion dollar company and {still} be a great guy or a great gal. I want to build the biggest building in town ever by just building the biggest building in town, while I think most people try to tear down everyone else’s building.

Cranking the Wheel

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“Spotify playlists, and Spotify charts, and Spotify plays, have become the number one tool that labels and artists and managers are using in order to break artists and measure success,” said industry analyst Mark Mulligan, speaking to Wired earlier this year. “If you get things working on Spotify, that’s going to crank the wheel.” Anyone who’s opened Spotify and found themselves clicking on their Daily Mix playlist, or fired up the app’s Discovery Weekly playlist already knows this. The app, and the impact of its playlist placements, are now an almost unspoken reality of the industry’s digital growth.

And so we come to this week’s news, of Spotify playing coy about what determines the song of the summer. In a blogpost published on Wednesday, the streaming service’s US team announced a – you guessed it – playlist of the tracks that they “predict” will soundtrack your BBQs, house parties and whatever other photogenic events you’ll be attending in the sunshine. “To create this year’s Songs of Summer predictions,” they wrote, “Spotify tapped the insights of its genre and trend experts, analysed its streaming data and considered factors such as a song’s performance on the charts, on key Spotify playlists and how it’s performing over time. The team also factored in buzz on social media to create a list of songs perfect for essential summer moments.”

At a glance you’d look at this and think, ‘oh cool, Spotify are predicting the future. That’s fun! They’re fun!’ But when you take a closer look, a couple of issues become clear. First, that you walk right into a chicken-and-egg situation. Do songs chart well because it’s been playlisted dominantly, and thus listened to by lots of people on Spotify? Or does it make that Spotify playlist position because it’s performing well on the charts? We don’t know about those inner workings within Spotify. But it’s bizarre for the company to both aggressively use reams of data to thrust certain songs under our noses, then act as though it doesn’t consequently set the agenda for what casual music listeners grow to like.

Music as Data, and the Wisdom of the Crowd

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The Conversation:

The Musical Genome, the algorithm behind Pandora, sifts through 450 pieces of information about the sound of a recording. For example, a song might feature the drums as being one of the loudest components of the sound, compared to other features of the recording. That measurement is a piece of data that can be incorporated into the larger model. Pandora uses these data to help listeners find music that is similar in sound to what they have enjoyed in the past.



This approach upends the 20th-century assumptions of genre. For example, a genre such as classic rock can become monolithic and exclusionary. Subjective decisions about what is and isn’t “rock” have historically been sexist and racist.



With Pandora, the sound of a recording becomes much more influential. Genre is only one of 450 pieces of information that’s being used to classify a song, so if it sounds like 75 percent of rock songs, then it likely counts as rock.



Meanwhile, Shazam began as an idea that turned sound into data. The smartphone app takes an acoustic fingerprint of song’s sound to reveal the artist, song title and album title of the recording. When a user holds his phone toward a speaker playing a recording, he quickly learns what he is hearing.



The listening habits of Shazam’s 120 million active users can be viewed in real time, by geographic location. The music industry now can learn how many people, when they heard a particular song, wanted to know the name of the singer and artist. It gives real-time data that can shape decisions about how – and to whom – songs are marketed, using the preferences of the listeners. Derek Thompson, a journalist who has examined data’s affects on the music industry, has suggested that Shazam has shifted the power of deciding hits from the industry to the wisdom of a crowd.