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Comments
Strange as it may seem, I actually don't agree with it. Not all of it, at least.
I do agree that "corporate music" is generally made to sound inoffensive, positive, uplifting and/or sad, etc. in various clichés, such as the sad piano chords or common ostinato chord progressions.
I disagree however that such music is "soulless" or otherwise horrible. It's certainly not particularly interesting, in most cases, but that's the purpose of it -- it's meant to stay in the background, creating a comfortable atmosphere for the listener, while having no prominent melodic or other features (such as fast bass/melody notes). Someone who stays quiet doesn't have no personality; they're just trying to be quiet for a reason. But, such improminence can certainly be appreciated -- there are definitely a handful of times when I really liked some of the music that got used in advertising.
Also, I strongly disagree with the implication that ostinato -- i.e. repeated patterns in the music, such as chords -- are bad. A huge variety of music uses ostinatos, from folk songs to pop songs to techno and other electronic styles to even classical styles that use variations on shorter themes, particularly the chaconne/passacaglia. There's quite a lot of interesting.
I mean, open this youtube video in a background tab (i.e. don't watch the video), and consider whether it sounds like it could be used in some sort of background music for advertising for some social cause.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqQRX0ptw3w
In my opinion it's only about 3 minutes in that you start to think maybe it might be too "interesting" for advertising purposes.
Yet, this is
So, I'd argue that this video's opinion about "corporate music" doesn't properly distinguish the music itself from its metacontext.
Also, this "corporate music" genre (or non-genre) is more accurately characterized as a subset of "soundtrack" music more generally, which is not really a genre either, because like he says it's not really one specific style/genre but rather something could be anything depending on needs.
There are definitely trends/fads/clichés with regards to how music is used in advertising, and this has been the case since forever, just that nowadays advertisers have more access to a huge variety of sounds and instruments that can be transmitted with near-perfect fidelity, compared to how an advertiser would have to rely on whatever acoustic instruments were on hand, a century or two ago. So, nowadays, a full range of cliché musical elements -- anything from sad piano moments to monster truck electric guitar moments -- are very, very easily accessible to any advertiser, which means that they in turn aren't forced to make unusual choices of instruments sound like whatever. (Why try to force a piano to sound like a hunting horn when you can get a hunting horn sound directly?) This in turn makes the music sound more generic since it really is making use of clichés with less variance between instances.
Sidenote: I sometimes wonder if a similar thing may be happening to video game music. Contrast back in the day when different games had limited sets of sound samples which differed from game to game. That meant that composers had to adapt their style to fit a de facto limited set of instruments, while nowadays they can't; this in turn means that they need to distinguish works based on other things, such as harmonic/melodic/rhythmic/instrumentation/timbre styles of their choice, even though the baseline instrumentation now defaults to generic but high-definition recordings of pretty much every instrument. It's a double-edged sword, I'd say; old games even when they played basically similar tunes could sound radically different; nowadays this has to be done "manually" rather than simply left to being enforced by technical limits.
There was a time in my teens when I believed in the SOUL OF TRUE ART but you know what, liking things by true artists is hard and annoying. It's better to just like what you like, even if the guy making it is Marketing Team Member #6 who has only made music once.
Similarly, everybody knows the Swedish DJs aren't in it for some amazing art, but those guys create some of the best music known to man.
Critics who criticize via unexplained generality aren't doing a very good job.
And I just generally dislike people who go out of their way to try and paint some inoffensive thing as being Objectively Wrong for no real reason.
I'd say probably the 1:40 mark? I quite like this. I wouldn't go out of my way to listen to it but I think it's pretty brilliant.
I mean, everybody knows this at this point, or should, but he's acting as if their whitewashing is high-Vox dangerous propaganda, it's not.
I mean, I see ads going "Come to Dubai with all our diversity" all the time and I'm like "well not till you figure out how to stop flogging gay people to death and treating your labor-class immigrants like trash" but that's just life.
For goodness sakes they produce ads where hyper-skinny women eat from a tub of full-fat yoghurt and everybody knows that's fake too, just like when HyperAbs KJ Apa eats junk food on Riverdale (then spits it out onto a bucket just off camera).
Woke up this morning,
Still half asleep,
With one eye open check IJBM la politique,
Look at the forums,
What's happening~
Better get in an argument,
That's super irrelevant.
Next thing I knew,
From that thread I hear you,
Being to-tally wrong,
Disagreeing with me,
I know!
I better pull out sixty stanzas.
Sometimes,
GMH don't understand,
That I,
Would rather be 100% wrong,
Than admit that,
He might be right,
It's my eternal plight~
Wednesday night,
Argument time,
Notepad my post,
So I don't lose any lines.
Apparently,
The place to be...
Is making triple posts,
And inflaming our speech.
Why didn't I re-ply,
Before it was bed-time,
Now I'll never get to sle-ep.
Sometimes,
Your brain doesn't understand,
Sleep-time,
Is not the best for play-by-plays,
Of massive text,
Stuck in your head,
Shouldn't have,
De-esca-lated...
Don't read through,
Don't reply,
Is all I hear,
Inside my head...
Wouldn't you rather go do stuff,
Than sit around here,
Counting out time spent...
For once,
I wish for self-restraint!!!
Sometimes,
Nobody here understands,
That I,
Have massive walls of text to write,
About everything
And every one,
In free-time,
I'll have none!
Sometimes,
Nobody here understands,
That I,
Would rather spend all day typing,
Than do the things,
That I'm meant to,
Need to,
Do what I should...
Sometimes,
Nobody here understands,
(But specifically G-M-H...)...
Sometimes,
Nobody here understands,
(But specifically G-M-H...)...
So yeah, I have a full song now!
Hilariously enough this also took up more time.
This is art.
Edit: oh, if you use the > to quote something that breaks the HTML later on
Like all genre/style definitions, the edges can be fuzzy. Exactly where religious music stands can be a point of dispute, as well as exactly where these temporal or spatial borders are. Also, there are a number of works that are considered "classical-influenced", sometimes by simply putting a violin in it or something. So it's not really cut-and-dry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music
Was there a specific border case you had in mind?
The more "art music" it is, the more likely people would be to count it.
Like, music by this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_(composer)
Almost certainly counts.
Final Fantasy orchestral remix album? Probably "game music but remixed with classical influences".
But, if you went and wrote a full-length multi-movement piano sonata, in the proper forms and all, based on themes from Final Fantasy, then you'd be somewhere even further in between these two. There's definitely unexplored conceptual territory here.
Meanwhile, further away from this is stuff like that one Celine Dion song that features that Japanese violinist guy.
for reference, it can be heard here (for now at least)
(inb4 "it has a full version?")
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Well, I mean, I like it. Somehow it reminds me of DAWN from .hack//Legend of the Twilight but I'm not really sure how. It certainly isn't the instrumentation
Now this is curious. You guys who do music theory, are there any fancy terms on what does this AI do to the song? Like, can the results be classified as some specefic genre or musical style? The comments section mentions avant-garde jazz.
"Avant-garde jazz" seems to be used by some people to refer to "here's a jumble of musical sounds that have certain patterns but I don't recognize them as coherently anything else", lol.
(courtesy of @Bluesy_Cowgirl who posted this elsewhere)
@glennmagusharvey: May'n released a song about idea pods!
For some reason I dislike it. Might be the fact that its rather repetitive refrain is basically all that's noticeable in the show itself, and that it just jumps into the IV-V-iii-vi progression (technically here VI VII v i) repeatedly without contextual preparation.
This song seems to have a very similar feel throughout it. Also it seems to end in the middle of the bridge or something?
The whole mini-album is quite experimental.
Amusingly, they don't use the "La Folia" theme. I found this video while looking for that. But I still like the music.
Yeah this is the first time I've thought of it since the schoolgirl era of AKB48.
Given that it's been years since then I was probably right.
Speaking of songs of the moment;
I'm planning on making a "Best Songs from Eurovision" list but I can only really do 2016-2018. I'm planning on listening to the 2019 songs at some point soon (and also by the time you go back and check the giant embarrassing thing I made a huge deal out of about Tel Aviv it'll be gone) and then listening to the 2020 songs properly, but like... Russia really wanted to win 2020.
I don't think I'd even count either of them fully as "music". They were REOL's Q? and FAKY's little more (no decent YT uploads of the latter yet).
I wonder if I've finally found the limit of what I'm willing to listen to.
Ah by the way @Stormtroper; I was wrong, Nanawo Akari is not a VTuber, but a real person who is amongst the new crop of SACRA artists along with Sayuri (does she still count as new?), ASCA, and ReoNa.
For some reason YouTube stopped recommending me her other music videos even though I know they're there. I'll watch them one of these days.
It seems I misremembered the whole thing. I've certainly confused Nanawo Akari and Nanami Yoshi at least once... somewhere...
Gayest Eurovision Music Videos 2019
Chingiz - Truth
Michaela - Chameleon (Literally a summer Elle magazine editorial)
Duncan Lawrence - Arcade (qualifies only by the barest of terms as it primarily features a naked man)
Weirdest Eurovision Music Video 2019: KEiiNO - Spirit in the Sky
Why the furries man?
Biggest Shock: Australia Kate Miller-Heidke - Zero Gravity
What happened here? Australia never takes Eurovision this seriously! They usually just send some actual musician. This lady, this lady gets it. It's scary how much she gets it.
In other news; Cyprus needs to get rid of this hyper millenial woop house party nonsense. They're becoming the only country I can tell a song is from without checking.
I didn't know that Sergey Lazarev (2016) came back to represent Russia in 2019. He came back with a ballad, which was slightly disappointing, but it's a good ballad.
Like, a few times I've posted about dungeon synth. We've already commented how it's a music for dungeon exploration, and the musicians never exactly denied the link, but by now, there are dungeon synth releases that were explicitly created as theme music to Dungeons & Dragons modules.