Is Technology Robbing Music's Soul?

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Technology is robbing music's soul? Damn you technology, damn you!

Have you ever really thought about the difference between the way older and present-day recordings affect you? I'm not so much talking about sound quality; older recordings have a very different feel. They have more juice, more soul, more life, and that's why they connect with people in a completely different way than hyperprocessed contemporary music does.
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Eh. A Cnet article. Meh.

Due to recording tech being lossless and darn close to perfect in the ability to capture even the slightest noise, acoustic recordings today are more concerned with being "perfect" than anything else. Because if the rhythm isn't good and the pitch not perfect, no one will care what you have to say.

That being said, most people listen to music on players and headphones/speakers with the acoustic properties of tin-cans. One of my officemate co-irkers called his $20USD headphones "expensive" and "nice"...and he is a musician, and doesn't even know what nice audio gear can sound like.
 
Lame. People have been saying the same thing since disco in the 70s, synth pop in the 80 and beyond. It's not a valid argument.

I was a teenager in the 80s. Ask yourself, is there any song that could ever be released that would possibly have the same impact or meaning on your life now as the ones that came out in your teenage years? The answer for the majority of people is no, which is why I find comparisons between modern music and oldies invalid.
 
Jazz purists are the worst. They begrudge even the Fender Precision electric bass guitar. To me it is the creator of the music who has soul and not the instrument it is played on.
 
Yeah we should record everything on analog and play it on vinyl...:confused:

This guy is also a moron who doesn't know that the way things are done now are done in pretty much the same way they were then. I know a few producers who worked during the 70s/80s and tell me about how they had to make whole vocal tales from individual words or syllables from hours of sessions to get one perfect take. You can do the same now, just with much less effort.

There has been autotune and melody correction since forever, and not everybody uses it. When people compare one era with another, they go "this band I loved in 1952 was wonderful compared to this pop act I saw on youtube, so all the music now is shitty". It's like comparing some 19th century novel to a walmart flyer and saying how all modern writing is classless.

He missed a giant word out of his crap. CAN. Computers CAN do things, they don't do it by default. It's people choosing to do them because they prefer it. They also allow you to do things that means you aren't limited by other people. You can sit in your room and making cities of glass, rather than sitting in the sandpit making a hut out of pebbles. But if you want you can still make a shitty pebble hut.

He wins moron of the day. He claims that the "ideas" are the most important thing...so why exactly does it matter on the delivery? So he likes all the sounds of human errors and "random" occurances of screw ups? All of that can easily be recreated...digitally... The "dirty" human/analog combination can be done digitally, but the clean "digital" sound is pretty imposible the other way. Whats so bad about gaining options while losing nothing?

Old people bitching:
 
I've said it for years. Same thing with the new picture algorithm apps such as the devil itself, Instagram *shudders*.
 
Technology has no effect on music. MONEY though does. This in turn, cause corporations to literally manufacture music.

Music nowadays is literally created. Lady Gaga writes music for others. Singers are chosen based on looks and sex appeal. There are no bands anymore, just individuals.

Companies don't relay on a garage band to make a hit song. They will make their own, and it will be terrible.
 
Though it's not a far cry to say modern music is trash, regardless of the medium. It doesn't matter if it's on a phonograph, LP, CD or MP3. As George Carlin said, garbage in, garbage out.
 
Shadowplay said:
Lame. People have been saying the same thing since disco in the 70s, synth pop in the 80 and beyond. It's not a valid argument.

I was a teenager in the 80s. Ask yourself, is there any song that could ever be released that would possibly have the same impact or meaning on your life now as the ones that came out in your teenage years? The answer for the majority of people is no, which is why I find comparisons between modern music and oldies invalid.
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Ding ding ding. Winner.
 
The article is not entirely wrong.

There was music made with no heart, feel or soul in the 70's, there is music made with no heart, feel or soul now, but a little more because money makes the world go 'round and you know what normal people seem to like to listen to. Composition matters the most of anything, regurgitated tracks that seem composed by readings of "$Genre for Dummies" can never become exciting no matter the instruments or the equipment that filters, affects and delivers it, and without good composition today.. you know what it's like!

Popular modern music is mixed with an iPhone speaker as a reference (that's what my gear tells me as I spot one f'd up frequency buzz after another, that only vanish after I switch to my $5 headphones), gets compressed to a dynamic death (often one compressor per instrument channel) and uses auto-tune with serious intentions, everything is quantized, mechanical and lifeless.

More quantized, mechanical and lifeless than freaking 80's synth music.

But maybe I'm biased, I love that shit and my DX7 arrives on Friday.


/ranting by some g who's finally stepped up and started making music for other people, from a home studio using mostly hardware equipment
 
PeaKr said:
It wasn't technology that robbed music of its soul, it was the RIAA.
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This.

Ashbringer said:
Technology has no effect on music. MONEY though does. This in turn, cause corporations to literally manufacture music.

Music nowadays is literally created. Lady Gaga writes music for others. Singers are chosen based on looks and sex appeal. There are no bands anymore, just individuals.
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And this.

I've listened to plenty of auto-tuned songs that were acceptable to phenomenal. It's the horribly non-creative/repetitive, assembly line created crap that the music industry thinks will sell that is ruining music's "soul". Tech isn't "killing" music, the industry that "governs" it is.

The wonderful thing about technology is that you are no longer forced to listen to the crap they are trying to feed you... If anything, technology is / has been making music steadily more available (and in my eyes... better).
 
Music back then took talent and creativity. Today's crap has neither. Same goes for singing voices. I've heard a couple songs where I was like "not bad" and then then singer opens their mouth and I reach for the power button. Dubstep sucks IMO.
 
meant to add that it doesn't matter what kind of technology is used to make the music. You still need talent and creativity.
 
Read one paragraph from that article before I called bullshit. First of all singing isn't music, it is singing. Crappy singing will always ruin good music.
 
autotune - fucking kill it. KILL IT NOW. I havent heard a good tune since '93 (well ok, maybe 2 or 3)
 
Some of you guys need to read the article before posting. He's right, the people making music (IDK who to blame) are more concerned with perfection than excellence. Things like AutoTune and splicing together different takes of the same music is taking away the human element. It's more like a scientific exhibit than it is a group of people making music together.
 
^^^ And BTW it doesn't matter that Steve Guttenberg publishes his articles via CNet... he's Steve Guttenberg.
 
I don't really care how crappy pop music gets. There are plenty of folks out there still making good stuff.
 
Oh, and:

All this machinery making modern music. Can still be open-hearted. Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question. Of your honesty, yeah, your honesty.
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:)
 
There is still plenty of great music being made, stop listening to the radio. It would blow your mind how much shit music came out in 1950-1980.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
I don't really care how crappy pop music gets. There are plenty of folks out there still making good stuff.
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very true. Little that's carried and pushed by the major labels is worth listening too. I do have to say that there's nothing quite like listening to vinyl record. It not the cleanest sound, but it has a smoothness/warmness to it that's hard to beat.
 
I turn off the quantizer and record my drums with pads played with sticks for my electronic music projects. Even when my timing is right it's not perfect when looking at the raw numbers covering the timing in milliseconds and the velocity varies in a very realistic manner. Small things like that add a lot, my clients tell me.


And hey. It was easier to get hold of non-shit music in the old days. Now you could tell me the big labels are working against the smaller ones who carry the original good stuff and I would believe you :(
 
..and I dig small parts of what Lady Gaga has for her own music, but not her "music" so much as a whole, she's a good person and an admiring musician who knows how to get under peoples skin/into peoples heads.

It's like a scary amount of all the world-touring electronic musicians I know and regularly communicate with in one way or another - "we have to do dubstep because it sells" (tickets and records) :/
 
Go to a movie rental place, or a magazine rack, and look at the people on the covers. They're so fake looking. They often look like plastic. Technology has been used to do the same for music, made it fake sounding. The human texture has been wiped away.
 
Ashbringer said:
Technology has no effect on music. MONEY though does. This in turn, cause corporations to literally manufacture music.

Music nowadays is literally created. Lady Gaga writes music for others. Singers are chosen based on looks and sex appeal. There are no bands anymore, just individuals.

Companies don't relay on a garage band to make a hit song. They will make their own, and it will be terrible.
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this is it.

what gets big and pushed is created..even if the band or singer starts on their own, if they are picked up, they get manufactured.

music with soul still exists, you just need to look other places for it, and mass media masses usually aren't interested in doing so.
 
Two people with the same opinion doesn't make it a fact, Mr. Guttenberg. It just means two people have opinions.
"They were bands, they banded together to get out of where they were. The studio gave them maybe three hours to knock out a tune, and when you can hear that angst, that desperation, you get performances."
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Really? So what made the music good was that they had to do it within a time limit? :rolleyes:

Talent is what creates good music, that gives it a soul, with or without technology. It just goes to show that creating quality music is hard work, and there are a lot of people that don't have a lot of talent.
If musical groups back in the day had the technology that's available today, they would have used it. I can't even imagine the fantastic songs that would have come out of their imaginations with what we can do with sound today.

We have the ability to listen to more types of music today than we've ever had in the past. Just listen to what you like, and shut the hell up about why you think current music is bad. We get it, you're old, and that music is going to rot our brains...

images.jpg
 
Stone Cold said:
Go to a movie rental place, or a magazine rack, and look at the people on the covers. They're so fake looking. They often look like plastic. Technology has been used to do the same for music, made it fake sounding. The human texture has been wiped away.
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Vocaloids look and sound more real than those people on the covers.
 
-The first step to listening to good new music is to stop listening to the radio. Satellite radio is a great start; various music blogs; various smaller music magazines/publications are even better.
-Don't rely on services like Pandora. Simply looking for "stuff that sounds like XXX" won't find you much good stuff, maybe 1 in 20 end up being "good". These services rely on certain bands being sponsored to be hits, and you just fall back into the corporate cycle of shit music.
-Music Genres have expanded, and continue to expand. Dubstep is a completely valid evolution of that type of music, just because you like it, and apparently so has marketing assholes for the 12-30 demographic have as well, doesn't mean its terrible. It's just over (and inappropriately) used. I find that dubstep is much better when accompanied by a strong video, the #1 result in a youtube search for "dubstep" is a GREAT example. Amazing remix of the song, and amazingly talented guy dancing to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXO-jKksQkM
-There is great music being made of every genre, be it core ones, or derivatives.
-This might sound stupid and counter-intuitive to what I've said above ...but car commercials. There are some absolutely AWESOME bands that have either clips or melodies of their tracks being put into various auto commercials. Search for their originals, you might like them.
-Lastly, and this is certainly to be debated, Punk is in fact dead. It's time has come and passed. Others my copy it, but it will never be "punk" as it was before.

That's about all i can say about that.
 
I blame the pitch shifter, yay buy your way into music with your empty songs about fucking and partying

and electronic artists, wow you put effect filters on samples or midis you didnt even make! genius
 
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