The great medieval city of Bruges, Belgium, is about to get a modern upgrade: a pipeline which will transport beer through the city so as to cut down on the number of deliverers that traverse its streets. Is this a good idea or bad idea?
The Man in the High Castle
I recently watched Amazon’s new episode/series entitled, “The Man in the High Castle“. The series is one of those “web only” ones which Amazon will continue to produce if it users like it more than other “web only” series it’s crafting. The only actor I recognized from it was Rufus Sewell, who seemed to have almost dropped off the face of the acting earth for a good decade or so after what I thought was a decent acting career in the early 2000s.
Without giving too much away, TMITHC is about America in the 1960s…if it had lost World War II. The United States is divided into the “Greater Reich” (basically everything east of the Rockies) and the the Japanese Pacific territory (West Coast). There is a strip of land separating German and Japanese holdings called something like the “Neutral Zone”.
It’s an interesting attempt at creating a dystopian future America, even if I was not overly compelled by the storyline. If Amazon does pick up the series I may watch it, but after the first episode I cannot say that it is must-see historical fiction.
Can it be proven that pop music is actually getting “worse”?
A study came out a few years ago which seems to bolster the argument that pop music has actually gotten worse over time. The study measured three aspects of music to see how it has changed since the mid-twentieth century – timbral, pitch, and volume – and the conclusion was that it’s turned into a blog of monotony:
…timbral variety went down. That means that songs are becoming more and more homogeneous. In other words, all pop music sounds the same now. Take this fake pop song for example.
The study also found that pitch content has decreased – which means that the number of chords and different melodies has gone down. “Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries,” Scientific American explains.
This is kind of neat on a few levels.
- I think the findings give evidence for what everyone has thought from time to time anyway.
- The progression of music towards homogeneity may simply reflect increasing globalization, which has causes a lot of the nuances of culture to be lost.
- Thanks to the internet, the increase in musical “sameness” has likely accelerated at a much greater rate over the past few decades.
Personally, these findings don’t bother me much – and I am a music lover. Just as the internet (and accompanying globalization) has decreased one aspect of cultural diversity, it has opened up another. I listen to far more variety in music now, thanks to streaming music sites like Spotify, than I ever did when I was growing up in an internet-less world. I regularly listen to styles – from Trinidadian steel drums to Samba to Monteverdi to Carly Rae Jepsen – that would have been almost completely unavailable to me less than twenty years ago.
Perhaps the real problem with the “sameness” in pop music today is not in pop music itself, but instead in the consumers who demand more of the same and avoid the opportunity to explore other genres that they can do so easily.