Where will music go from here?

[Nine Volt]

(Sorry if this should be in community, but 'what genres do you want to see brony music made in' is here, so I put this here too)

I'll get straight to the point:
Music will keep changing, regardless of how much we want it to remain the same. New genres are coming into existence (or at least into popular music) almost every year. My question is: where do you see music going from today? What kind of music do you think people will be making in 10 years? 20? 50? 100, even?

[CDPP]

If the rate of urbanization continues unabated, we'll be more adapted to the ambient noise of the city with each new generation. We'll probably be living the Futurists' dream and start listening to noise. Merzbow would be treated as an artistic genius decades ahead of his time. Maybe by then our senses would have further developed, so what they hear as an auditory orgasm of the highest order would be to our untrained ears be the sound of a chainsaw.

[vladnuke]

If the rate of urbanization continues unabated, we'll be more adapted to the ambient noise of the city with each new generation. We'll probably be living the Futurists' dream and start listening to noise. Merzbow would be treated as an artistic genius decades ahead of his time. Maybe by then our senses would have further developed, so what they hear as an auditory orgasm of the highest order would be to our untrained ears be the sound of a chainsaw.

Sounds like you just described granular synthesis in a nutshell.

[Applejinx]

I think the biggest changes have been:

-moving from instruments that produce fixed tonalities (and genres that are based on the tonalities) to synthetic instruments and the co-mingling of all manner of textures and already-recorded styles

-moving from melody and direct human expression (programmatic stuff like 'song by sad guy about lost love') to texture and expression through rhythm and tone (abstract stuff like 'song by dead mau5 about loud clicking beat while other noises placidly revolve about it in a tricky polyrhythm, slowly enough to still work in stadiums')

There's a personal aspect that's been lost with all the programming and editing of stuff, and it's masked by the fact that textures and rhythms are shown off most easily without the distraction of the personal, but it might come back. If it does it'll have to be within the context of music now being about juxtapositions of stuff. There will be no more guitar solo heroes, but maybe a hit song where a guy improvises on guitar and then whips out a flugelhorn... or does parkour while playing, against big percussion instruments or something. It might not all seem like music...

There will be expressiveness again but it will never be simply recreating a time where you had to be a virtuoso to deliver what machines can now effortlessly do. The expressiveness will be in telling stories using sound, stories that go beyond our rigid and overly-defined genres all with their obligatory sounds. More like, brostep: then suddenly Dixieland! Just as a musical joke. Or Dixieland and then acid house with the 303s dancing around just as contrapuntally, and only long enough to make that mood and then on to something else.

Matt and Trey from South Part did a visit to a screenwriting class where they explained that 'and then' was the worst possible thing you could use to tell a story. They like 'therefore', or 'but', as dividing lines between things, because they force scenes to be logically related and go in a direction. It's the same for music: do a totally unexpected thing? Cool, but if it's 'and then' there's kinda no point. If you work things up to a chaotic busy mess and THEREFORE break to some more spare, relaxed thing, or get stuff pulling against the tension of the beat BUT then the beat's gone and it's all about the conflict for a moment until you really need it to come back THEREFORE the beat returns, that makes more sense than just doing random stuff to be textural and postmodern...

I'm pretty sure it's gonna have to do with composition on a larger conceptual sense rather than developing expertise in things that can be done by computers, but you learn stuff by doing it the old way too... it's just that the result can't seem too old school and confined into one box, no matter which box. The range of expression suddenly includes every noise ever made in history, it's a matter of which ones are right for which place in a song, next to what.

[Jimmy]

Well, hmm.

Forgive me for being pessimistic, but I really don't like the way things are going. I see the trend in increasingly "noisy" music only going further - most popular music is incredibly loud and obnoxious, and this is a down to a deliberate choice of modern songwriters. Perhaps it could also be linked to the loudness war, and this is the final last-ditch effort of the songwriters fighting to make their music as loud as possible.

The modernization of music creation, and the hugely dramatic increase of the number of tools at our disposal, has led to a massive, overwhelming surplus in the variety of sounds we can make, which ultimately has led to a decline in modern music's overall quality. The artificialization of the songwriting process means that it's no longer an art anymore, it's a science - everything has to be digitally enhanced and polished and mixed in just the right way to sound right under all of our modern sound systems. People who sell music of their own creation are no longer really called "songwriters", moreso "producers". Songs aren't just recorded anymore, they're written, produced, mixed, then sent to a studio and mastered.

I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, and watched this video recently which goes along the same lines.

[Captain Ironhelm]

It's gonna be polka funk dubstep pop jazz all the way.

[Nine Volt]

Till the sun burns out :3

[Stu Beef]

People will go radically in one direction while others try to pull it back in the other one. This will continue for eternity, just like it always has.

It's hard to imagine how much more experimental people can get with things like bringing nontraditional sounds and tones into music. I suppose I can really only imagine the weirdest stuff that I hear today becoming accepted in 20 years, and by then someone will have thought of something even weirder. It's sort of like asking some German dude in 1600 to imagine Serialism, it just doesn't make sense without the context. I definitely don't see rhythm evolving too much; rhythm is pretty much THE connection when it comes to certain styles that people might deem "noise". I definitely expect expansion of phrases, ignoring meters, and maybe even more microtonal stuff to become a little more prominent. I dunno, musical innovations often largely hinge on societal things, and I can't predict the future, so who knows.

[XXDarkShadow79XX]

Well, hmm.

Forgive me for being pessimistic, but I really don't like the way things are going. I see the trend in increasingly "noisy" music only going further - most popular music is incredibly loud and obnoxious, and this is a down to a deliberate choice of modern songwriters. Perhaps it could also be linked to the loudness war, and this is the final last-ditch effort of the songwriters fighting to make their music as loud as possible.

The modernization of music creation, and the hugely dramatic increase of the number of tools at our disposal, has led to a massive, overwhelming surplus in the variety of sounds we can make, which ultimately has led to a decline in modern music's overall quality. The artificialization of the songwriting process means that it's no longer an art anymore, it's a science - everything has to be digitally enhanced and polished and mixed in just the right way to sound right under all of our modern sound systems. People who sell music of their own creation are no longer really called "songwriters", moreso "producers". Songs aren't just recorded anymore, they're written, produced, mixed, then sent to a studio and mastered.

I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, and watched this video recently which goes along the same lines.

Dude, science IS art. If your brain must generate something, it's art.

[Ed Viper]

Clearly, Mass Effect has shown us that music won't change much over the next 250 years.



But seriously, who knows? With many artists simply forgoing traditional music theory in favor of crazy sounds and odd melodies, there might be a whole new theory of music developed from the advancement of noise music.

I feel though that there are still a larger number of people who prefer melody than noise in music. Most of the people I'm friends with dislike dubstep and other forms of noise music. Most people want music to be something they relax to. Something they can play in the background to help them focus on a project or some other work they're doing. I'm just not sure that noise music can really achieve this level of satisfaction.

Of course, I could be totally off on this. Who knows?

[Stu Beef]

^^^^Honestly, I think the producers and the listeners ARE the theorists of contemporary "noise" music. The canon of harmony isn't just defined by what old dudes say in classrooms; I read about the ten million steps it takes to get a kick sound or a weird robot noise and just go "damn".

The bounds will continue to be stretched in the underground, and popular culture will catch up eventually. However, with such easy access to a wealth of information due to the internet and mass media (I'm including sounds, sights, etc.) people will find it much easier to plant their feet in whatever niche they desire, at the same time others will find it easier to discover newer, stranger things.

stuff

I think you might be over-Romanticising a bit. I'm reminded of the complaint/argument I hear about ART/MUSIC BEING DEAD, WHY COULDN'T I HAVE BEEN BORN 2000 YEARS AGO WHEN PEOPLE WERE MAKING REAL ART and usually they cite some popular thing as an example of our undeniable decline. So, the face of Pop Culture is shallow and void of merit? Uhh, duh, that's almost the definition. I don't mean to skew your argument or put words in your mouth, I'm just making a comparison here.

I really don't see what's declined about music. It's more accessible from both an input and an output standpoint. It seems like anyone with the attitude could put things out there, and music of all kinds is made more and more public for listeners. If anything it's gotten MUCH better. Improvements and innovations can be made on a vast scale, and much faster due to instantaneous communication. Joe Schmo can play his 4 chords for youtube, and little Einstein can build a bomb in his DAW because society pretty much lets people do these things. So what if most people wanna hear robot-lovin' or empty club songs? It was pretty much the same 200 years ago, you really only hear about the stuff that was good because...it was good. Just like throughout history, what is deemed important in the progression of things will survive, everything else will likely be lost only to people who really care, but with wikipedia anyone can become an armchair scholar so 200 years from now there will probably be some neckbeards debating the merits of Skrillex and his impact on western culture.