http://www.isteve.com/Music_Catchy_Tunes.htm

Discuss.

The concept of rock and rap music being decades old as being reason for its "diminishing returns" is absurd. The melodic and harmonic concepts widely employed in popular music today are even more simplified iterations of the tonal heirarchy established in the Classical period which began over 250 years ago. As pointed out in the article, the mathematical possibilities of just the 12 unique pitch classes we use in Western music is staggering, and that's not even counting melodies whose range is more than an octave, or which uses repeated tones, or which uses any number of unique pitch classes fewer than 12. The issue of a "small percentage" of possible melodies being appealing is one of personal taste (including cultural indoctrination, level of musical training, and experience with a variety of music) and accompaniment.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>The issue of a "small percentage" of possible melodies being appealing is one of personal taste (including cultural indoctrination, level of musical training, and experience with a variety of music) and accompaniment.

I'm finding that to be untrue... many are not just "unappealing", but complete gibberish. Like what you get with monkeys on a typewriter, or a random sentence generator following the grammatical rules.

What distinguishes gibberish from sense is much more objective than what is "pleasing".

Not really. I find http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4JzzDKVi5E pleasing.

You seem cool. I'm gonna leave http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCgicEWD1Nc&feature=related here for your perusal.

I have nothing more to add. I'm out of this discussion as the article said all I can say already.

The amount of music where this is true as a result of the brain's actual ability to perceive information is likely to be marginal. Cultural indoctrination is definitely an issue here: To the ear untrained in its practice (i.e. mine), much Indian classical music sounds remarkably the same and more or less inscrutable. As it turns out, there are well-documented accounts of the highly organized rules used in this music, and how to anyone intimately familiar with it, the "rules in play", so to speak, are immediately obvious based on context, creating an idiomatic framework in which to explore and enjoy certain musical ideas.

I also once perceived Western classical music in a similar manner. There are of course, the "hits" that everyone knows, many of which are from the Classical period whose aesthetics prized simplicity and clarity, but beyond that, we have the early, the Medieval, the Baroque, the Romantic, and the modern flavors of "classical" music (and more, still!). The more I learned about music formally, the more easily I was able to discern the qualities of certain styles and periods, and going even deeper, individual composers. Despite coming from a background of metal and avant-garde progressive rock, genres which often revel in dissonance and complexity, much of modern classical music confounded and repelled me. At this point, I have gained a large appreciation for much of this music and have discovered the basic ideas which most tickle my fancy within this realm, and have pursued them and found that as I've gone on, my tastes have continued to expand, allowing me to appreciate even more related music which previously might have bored or offended me.

I'm more inclined to blame the sound than the music.

+1. I dabble in music-making from time to time, and have recently figured out how much better it is to resist the urge to compress the master channel to hell. I often wish the professionals had figured out the same thing...

On topic: sometimes a song steals the tune from another song. The new song can be better or worse than the original (or sometimes just different). This bothers a lot of people, I've never really understood why. New St Vincent album approximates the tune from Hallelujah in the verse of this one song, it's still a great song (one of many on my personal album of the year so far). Cigarettes and Alcohol by Oasis steals the riff from Get It On (Bang A Gong), it rocks nevertheless.

So no, we will never run out of melodies - but will probably end up repeating some of them.