Category: Music
The making of K-Pop
Standing beside me was Jon Toth, a twenty-nine-year-old white guy, a computer scientist who had driven twelve hours straight from New Mexico. Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation, a nine-member girl group in the process of recording its American début album, with Interscope Records. At the time he stumbled across the Girls, on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer. “I was definitely not the kind of guy you’d expect to get into a nine-girl Asian group,” he told me. But before long Toth was studying Korean, in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows. Then he started cooking Korean food. Eventually, he travelled all the way to Seoul, where, for the first time, he was able to see the Girls—Tiffany, Sooyoung, Jessica, Taeyeon, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Yoona, and Seohyun—perform live. It was a life-changing experience.
“You think you love them, but then you see Tiffany point directly at you and wink, and everything else that exists in the world just disappears,” Toth wrote on Soshified, a Girls’ fan site. “You think you love them, but then you see Sooyoung look you dead in the eye and say in English, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” Toth concluded, “I might not know how much I love these girls.”
Here is much more, interesting throughout. How about this?:
Double-fold-eyelid surgery, which makes eyes look more Western, is a popular reward for children who get good marks on school exams. The popularity of the K-pop idols has also brought Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean “medical tourists” to Seoul to have their faces altered to look more like the Korean stars. Some hotels have partnered with hospitals so that guests can have in-house procedures; the Ritz-Carlton Seoul, for example, offers an eighty-eight-thousand-dollar “anti-aging beauty package.” Women come to have their cheekbones shaved down and undergo “double jaw surgery,” in which the upper and lower jawbones are cracked apart and repositioned, to give the whole skull a more tapered look.
For the pointer I thank Viktor.
The science of conducting?, and homage to Clive Granger
DO ORCHESTRAL conductors do anything useful? Alessandro D’Ausilio of the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, and his colleagues tried to answer that eternal question in a study published in the Public Library of Science.
And:
Each violinist had an infra-red reflector attached to the tip of his bow, and the conductors had them attached to their batons. Dr D’Ausilio and his team were thus able to follow the movements of both bows and batons by bathing their little orchestra in infra-red light, which their cameras could see, but human beings cannot. They then used the movements of the reflectors to analyse who was affecting whom.
To do this, Dr D’Ausilio employed a mathematical trick called the Granger causality test…
And the (tentative I would say) result:
The findings are in harmony with what conductors knew all along: that baton-toting despots, like the late Herbert von Karajan, do add value—but only if they rein in the uppity musicians in front of them.
Questions about John Cage
Wednesday will count as his 100th birthday. Here are a few of my views:
1. Is it actually good music?
Much of it is, once you get past the gimmicks. For direct musical listening (skip 4’33”) I recommend the piano music, most of all by Herbert Henck or David Tudor or Stephen Drury. The important pieces have held up very well, and even the lesser pieces still are worth hearing at least once.
2. If I wish to try one important piece?
Perhaps “In a Landscape,” on this CD.
3. What if I am looking for a good sampler to reflect his diverse contributions?
Try the Barton Workshop grab bag.
4. Are you pulling my leg?
No.
5. Is aleatory music interesting?
To me, no.
Here is Wikipedia on John Cage. Here is John Cage on a 1960 game show, being thwarted by a union dispute. Here is good commentary on that clip. Here is TNR commentary on that clip. Cage was also an expert mycologist. Here are the Italian prizes he won for mushroom identification. Here is the iTunes prepared piano app.
Here are good quotations from John Cage.
The next transformational technology?
Noah Smith writes:
Addendum: I seem to be the only person talking about Desire Modification as a transformational technology. Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge have written books in which this technology plays a central role. In my “spare time” I’m writing a couple of sci-fi short stories based on the idea. It’s a really big deal, and I’ll write a post about it soon.
The Open Goldberg Variations, by Kimiko Ishizaka
Download it here, for free, superb listening, first-rate performance. You can follow it with a free score as well. It received three excellent reviews in Fanfare as well.
Astronaut self-insurance durable goods monopoly problem
During the 60s and 70s it would appear that private life insurance was not available to astronauts. Autograph Magazine has a good post about how astronauts of the time used their own autographs as a form of life insurance for their families.
Is Modern Music Boring?
Here, via Kevin Drum, is statistical evidence that modern pop music is boring or at least more homogeneous than in the past (yes, Tyler already linked to Kevin’s post but I wanted to link to the underlying dataset (see below)).
We find three important trends in the evolution of musical discourse: the restriction of pitch sequences (with metrics showing less variety in pitch progressions), the homogenization of the timbral palette (with frequent timbres becoming more frequent), and growing average loudness levels.
The picture at right shows the timbral variety:
Smaller values of β indicate less timbral variety: frequent codewords become more frequent, and infrequent ones become even less frequent. This evidences a growing homogenization of the global timbral palette. It also points towards a progressive tendency to follow more fashionable, mainstream sonorities.
The underlying data is from the Million Song Dataset which looks pretty cool and is open.
I wonder if this is actually true
Researchers who have scanned books published over the past 50 years report an increasing use of words and phrases that reflect an ethos of self-absorption and self-satisfaction.
“Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960,” a research team led by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge writes in the online journal PLoS One. “We believe these data provide further evidence that American culture has become increasingly focused on individualistic concerns.”
Their results are consistent with those of a 2011 study which found that lyrics of best-selling pop songs have grown increasingly narcissistic since 1980. Twenge’s study encompasses a longer period of time—1960 through 2008—and a much larger set of data.
Here is more.
*Climbing the Charts*
The author is Gabriel Rossman and the subtitle is What Radio Airplay Tells Us About the Diffusion of Innovation.
In other words, there is lots of payola. My blurb is:
Gabriel Rossman is the leading researcher in the sociology and economics of the music industry, and this book shows him at the top of his research and exposition powers.
You can buy it here. Rossman blogs here, and he is on Twitter here.
Is popular music becoming sadder?
Over the past half-century, pop hits have become longer, slower and sadder, and they increasingly convey “mixed emotional cues,” according to a study just published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.
“As the lyrics of popular music became more self-focused and negative over time, the music itself became sadder-sounding and more emotionally ambiguous,” according to psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg and sociologist Christian von Scheve.
Analyzing Top 40 hits from the mid-1960s through the first decade of the 2000s, they find an increasing percentage of pop songs are written using minor modes, which most listeners—including children—associate with gloom and despair. In what may or may not be a coincidence, they also found the percentage of female artists at the top of the charts rose steadily through the 1990s before retreating a bit in the 2000s.
…Strikingly, they found “the proportion of minor songs doubled over five decades.” In the second half of the 1960s, 85 percent of songs that made it to the top of the pop charts were written in a major mode. By the second half of the 2000s, that figure was down to 43.5 percent.
In addition, the songs’ average tempo has decreased over the decades, although this measure is a bit more complicated. “In absolute terms, the slowest-tempo recordings were from the 1990s,” they note, “which suggests that the trend may have leveled out, or started to reverse direction.”
The researchers found this slowdown was more pronounced for major-mode (that is, joyful) songs. This points to “a general reduction in unambiguously happy-sounding recordings,” they write, “as well as an increase in recordings with ambiguous emotional states.”
By the way, the Turtles song “Happy Together” is mostly in a minor key. There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Janice and also Brad Plumer.
Assorted links
1. Via Robert Martinez, interview with Kevin Shields, on labor market hysteresis and other matters. Excerpt:
I’ve got my own studio, just down the road from here. And in the ten years I’ve had it, I’ve only used it in three of them. The other seven years it’s been empty. I feel quite sad about that.
But I made a few big promises to myself when I was a kid, about 17. And so far I’ve managed to keep them. I was discovering all this great music, and I kept noticing this pattern of bands making great records and then tailing off. I thought “I don’t want to ever do that.” If for some reason I can’t make a great record, I won’t make a record at all. Because all you get is a little bit of money, which goes really fast anyway. It’s easier to do nothing and live on nothing than it is to do something and live on something when you’re running around compromising.
It’s better to do nothing than to do bad work.
KS: I think so. It’s like, being on the dole is better than being in a shit job, so long as you’ve got an interest in your life. Because if you’re in a shit job you don’t really have that much more money, and then after a few years your will to live begins to dissipate. The idea that it’s good to do stuff just for the sake of doing it, it’s a myth, I think. It’s a lie. It’s a very 80s concept – everything, everything being about productivity.
My favorite things Romania
1. Schubert pianist: Radu Lupu.
2. Conductor: Sergiu Celibadache. A high variance obsessive, Amazon doesn’t seem to carry his important recordings. At his peak he is one of the best conductors ever and can force a total rethink of the music upon you. He demanded so much rehearsal time, and so much perfection, that he was often impossible to work with. There is a short YouTube bit here.
3. Painter: I can’t name one, sorry. I have seen some nice folk art icon paintings on glass, see the image at the bottom of this post.
4. Sculptor: Constantin Brâncuşi, with a preference for Bird in Space.
5. Chopin pianist: Dinu Lipatti, especially the Waltzes.
6. Producer of maxims: Emil Cioran. I have enjoyed all of his books.
7. Poet: Paul Celan. I am surprised he is not more widely read in the United States. At his peaks I don’t think any 20th century poet is better or more important.
8. Novelist: Herta Müller, better in German than English, both linguistically and culturally.
9. Violinist: Georges Enescu, of course he was a composer too.
10. Mozart pianist: Clara Haskil.
11. Movie: I’ve tried a bunch of the famous recent ones, but I can’t get through them and this is from a man who gladly watched the entire 7 hour, 12 minute Sátántangó .
12. Former NBA basketball center: G. Muresan.
13. Economist: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.
The bottom line: There is some real beauty here, and aesthetic romance, but I don’t have a good theory for why novels and painting are not stronger.
*Marley*
I have to give this movie an A+. It is an outstanding treatment of the history of Jamaica, the Caribbean cultural blossoming after World War II, possible equilibria in individual human affairs, and of course the protagonist Bob Marley himself, as well as much much more. Marley by the way does not come off as a sympathetic character. The scenes from Zimbabwe and Germany are remarkable. The director is Kevin Macdonald, who also created The Last King of Scotland.
There are trailers here. Here is one good review. If you are seeking to normalize my review, in general I am not fond of “musical documentaries” and I do not consider Marley the peak of Jamaican music (I prefer Lee Perry, Desmond Dekker, and King Tubby, for a start). Think of this as a movie flat out and go see it on a large screen.
Clubsterben, the culture that is Berlin
Not everyone thinks gentrification is a good thing:
Politicians in Berlinhave launched a campaign to rescue the city’s legendary nightclub scene from the spectre of property investors in the hope of salvaging the capital’s reputation as one of Europe’s party hotspots.
A ‘Music Board’ fund of around €1m (£835,000) has been set up to help protect the city’s shrinking club scene, which has been a mainstay of the economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall but has found itself increasingly squeezed out by real estate investors.
Berlin’s clubs have even coined the word ‘clubsterben’ – literally, ‘club death’ – to describe the phenomenon. The €1m fund will be used to help stricken clubs find new locations and hold fundraising concerts.
Around 15 clubs are currently under threat of closure according to Spiegel, while three prominent clubs have closed within the last few months. The nightspots, which are often housed in grungy urban buildings, breweries, or former factories situated on prime land, are increasingly being converted into apartment blocks and loft homes.
Here is more. Here is an article on whether Berlin can afford its billion dollar arts subsidy programs. This sentence is interesting:
Since German reunification in 1990, the capital has seen about half of its population leave and be replaced by newcomers.
For both pointers I thank www.artsjournal.com.
Some Economics of Pay What You Want Pricing
A number of musicians and game developers have experimented with pay-what-you-want pricing (e.g. see the important field experiment by Gneezy et al. and less formal reports from Radiohead, Norwegian composer Gisle Martens Meyer and the video-game makers 2D Boy and Joost van Dongen.)
Imagine that under the pay-what-you-want model consumers choose to split their consumer-surplus with the seller. Here is a neat little proof for the linear demand case that under this heuristic profits are as large as under monopoly pricing! I have also assumed MC of zero which makes sense for digital goods and is also quite important to the result as pay-what-you-want can result in negative profits should consumers choose to pay less than marginal cost.
Split the consumer surplus is optimistic for the seller although splitting the gains does happen quite often in the dictator game so it is not without interest. Probably more importantly, pay-what-you-want pricing is going to be advantageous when the seller also sells a complementary good, such as concerts, which benefit from consumption spillovers from the pay-what-you-want good.