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Musical analysis is a complex academic discipline which, today, is inherently related to the fields of music technology and music economics. Why does musical analysis stay important in the music technology era? You may read more below.
WHAT IS MUSICAL ANALYSIS?
WHY MUSIC? QUALITY ESSAYS ON MUSIC LISTENING FOR AVID READERS
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MUSICAL CREATION AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW BETWEEN AESTHETICS AND TECHNOLOGY
What is entertainment law and how does it relate to the field of aesthetics?
Entertainment law can be defined as the section of law that covers professionals involved in entertainment industries like the music industry. Hence it concerns music composers, performers and all types of music producers. Furthermore, it is considered as a blending of intellectual property law, labor law and employment law and it includes litigation. Also, the concept of copyright is central.
Copyrightspecialists know that the very categories of copyright are, basically, linked to the domain of aesthetics: concepts like originality, transformation, reproduction, etc. show that humanity now prefers what is original and wants to encourage renewal, notably in the field of music. It was not always the case. Needs and values have changed: during the Middle Ages, creating new music was forbidden, variations were hardly permitted. And there were also eras during which borrowing was considered part of the creative work. That situation can look curious: in fact, the law claims not to get involved in aesthetic judgments.
Entertainment law and musical sampling
Let us notice that, if musicians are forbidden to take material published under copyright, they can borrow riffs or chords from musical pieces that are not under copyright, and own them. Furthermore, assemblage of individual singular beats is not generally something that copyright owners attempt to clear when, coming from songs that are already published, they are inserted in new songs. On the other hand, borrowed series of chords must generally be cleared, to avoid the risk of legal proceedings. Where is the limit? Actually there is really an industry of music licensing that is working at the molecular level: in certain cases, two or three notes can be protected by copyright. Anyhow there are new ways to overcome the dichotomy between copyrighted and non-copyrighted music and also to make more music available: creative commons. Under certain conditions, it is possible to create derivative works from original creations without infringing copyright laws.
How are illegal borrowings identified? That work may require the collaboration of musicologists. It is also based on computer programs that can compare large musical catalogs and locate material that has been appropriated. It was less easy some decades ago. Musical appropriation can be made in specific contexts and by following precise rules. If it is not substantial, it may be allowed. How do music specialists and lawyers determine if there is an infringement or not? They of course train their ears, but also their capacities of analysis and critical thinking. They apply all their skills to serve the unprecedented legal regime that currently regulates music, that creates a paradox between the immediate liberty given by technology and the supervisory practices applied by music owners and supported by the law.
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POP AND COUNTRY SONGS: HOW DO MUSIC PRODUCERS CREATE VALUE?
Musical characteristics and genres
Writing music, musicians must be conscious that the way music is discovered online is very different from genre to genre, in order to give an orientation to their marketing. For example, in the mainstream, a pop hit may reach the top of the charts in one week, then its success decreases. But for a country hit, it will be the contrary: the title will take numerous weeks to reach the top. Why is it useful for singer-songwriters to know such types of movements? Because they need to have some success in order to make sales and pursue their activity.
Which type of recipes do pop hits follow? Even if a song is not another one and all good pop songs do not become hits, generally, hits are mid-up tempo and often a hundred beats-per-minute or more. After two minutes and thirty seconds, a listener is bored and needs that something new to happen, musically. Often, hits are written by composers who are men and performed by singers who are women, which is a quite conservative model. The number of repetitions, in a hit, varies between five and forty. Statistically speaking, numerous hits include the word ‘you’ at the beginning of a song. The main theme of hits is undoubtedly, love, or at least relationships. For country, most of the time, performers are men, the tempo does not reach a hundred beats-per-minute.
Attitudes towards music
People will spend more time in a restaurant if they can listen to jazz music than if they listen to classical music, a study says. Nobody expects to hear marching band music in a shopping center. And pop consumers appreciate high tempo songs because they love to dance. What does it mean? That specific types of music enhance specific types of activities. Singer-songwriters who are aware of such facts can market the style of music they create more easily. Isn’t it conservative? Well, it is in the context of popular music, which a lot of people hear while doing their day-to-day activities.
It is up to musicians to position themselves in order to be found by their potential listeners. They have to be willing to seek out and to be honest with the type of music they want to create, as music listeners may sense how authentic they are, especially when they are trained listeners. They must also search for technical feedback and, sometimes, adjust their musical production to their audiences. Finally, let us notice that often, popular artists began their career by making music very different from what is popular. For example, during his early career, Pharrell Williams played kettledrums in a marching band, besides being involved in a rhythm and blues group.
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MUSIC, FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL
From vinyls to compact discs and online platforms
There are different types of audio files and these files are communicated by many individuals and companies to other individuals and companies, so that everyone can reach them on the web, everywhere and at every moment. Such transfers are allowed by digital audio compression techniques or algorithms. Each of these techniques, audio engineers say, present different levels in terms of complexity and resulting sound quality. All of them increase the efficiency of storage and transmission of sonic data.
Before digital, there was analog. What is the difference between analog and digital signals? A signal is described as analog when the information contained in that signal is made of physical elements like voltage or a spatial position, all these elements being measured using different units. For example, the information engraved on a vinyl record is analog. These physical elements vary from object to object: the analog information contained in a clock is not the same as that)enclosed in a road sign.
In the field of music as in others, there was a first series of transfers, around ten years ago, to extract the musical and sonic information written on vinyls to compact discs, which are digital media. Digital communicates information by using series of zeros and ones, that is why it is different from analog. So, from analog to digital, a substantial proportion of physicality is lost, and with physicality, a part of the original information. But digital presents one main advantage: it can be preserved more easily than analog. And as computers only handle digital data, to listen to music online required making the switch to digital too.
Do online audio components present differences in terms of quality?
The digital representation of music is more stable than the analog one was. It can be heard when, streaming online, the music listener finds an old piece of blues recorded in Louisiana during the 1930s: as the sound was extracted directly from a vinyl and not from a compact disc, noise can be heard. That does not happen with later vinyls that have been digitally remastered or with musical information coming from compact discs.
Now, between digital audio files themselves, is there a difference of quality? There is a great debate amongst audiophiles. A part of listeners, who hear differences between various audio components, are said to be subjectivists and those who do not are described as objectivists. That debate is not new, because it was already there before the stereo era itself and it is linked to methods used for evaluating audio equipment. Let us notice that, as audio equipment can be very expensive, that debate is first a business-to-business one, supported by the publication of magazines dedicated to audiophiles.
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DELIVERING MUSIC ONLINE: THE ROLE OF PLATFORMS ENGINEERS
Teams and processes to connect people to music
The core function of online music platforms is to connect people to music. Besides, these platforms dedicate a lot of time and resources to identify music in order to pay third parties, content owners like record labels, when people listen to music they own. Platforms deliver quality services to casual music listeners, for whom music personifies who they are. By doing so, they help labels to turn what was a threat into an opportunity for their businesses. Sometimes, platforms may have contracts with hundreds of thousands of labels.
What do platforms need to achieve such growth? First of all, development speed that is scaling and it also means creating teams where everyone can try out a lot of ideas, being on a mission to transform concepts in actual products. Big online music platforms have a team just to deal with the home page, another one that assures music playback without any delay, etc. Generally, each team chooses a specific process to ensure the growth of a sub-platform. And all do their best to align their target, even if they want to work in an autonomous way.
Meeting the specific targets of music listeners
Platforms engineers generally want to build features that others will benefit from hearing about. They are passionate about something and want to see more of it. Attracted by novelty, they also maintain a strong focus on pursuing previous targets that are essential to ensure the success of the whole project. That is why they define metrics and goals and estimate to what extent they will need help to achieve them. As developers, they of course tell the computer what they want it to do for them.
By doing so, they make something new from scratch. They solve problems, more precisely the problems they want to fix, getting a deeper understanding of computer science each time they achieve what they want. When it comes to online music, as for all content, there are different ways to build platforms, and different ways to take users’ wishes into account. They work to create the best user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). How can the user experience be optimal, when they use an application? First of all, users have themselves specific targets and they don’t want to be distracted.
Is the target of the user to explore more and more pieces of music each day, without any other criteria than mood or culture? Then a music streaming service is perfect, as it generally contains hundreds of thousands or even millions of songs. Is it to get music that fits specific musical criteria, independently of its cultural origin? Then YMusic is a master choice, as it presents features to help music listeners to find music based on elementary criteria, like rhythmic ones for instance.
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THE DESCRIPTION OF MUSIC IN THE AGE OF COMPUTING
Production, reproduction and representation of music
Music digitization includes different aspects of music creation and production and at the least scores, graphic materials and performances. Elements like sheet music, even when they are the product of computer assisted composition, and other physical objects do not last for ever. That is why digitization technologies are very useful: they produce information for different types of music producers, be it publishers, record labels or media, and all of them can exploit that information.
Musical information is communicated through files that are delivered in different electronic formats like MusicXML or MIDI. But what is, actually, musical communication? What can be transmitted is a set of ideas that a composer has translated into symbols. Or it can be a performance of these musical ideas. To be read, such musical features must be transmitted through specific encoding formats that are separated. No format can describe the data and metadata of musical pieces at the same time. Anyhow, it is easy to understand that computer files’ function is to create representations of music that can be shared between several users.
Types of musical information
Whatever the format to share is, musical information can be notational (the music notes in a sheet music for instance), structural (indicating relationships between musical objects), related to performance (executing a musical piece) or to sound (for digital recordings). That information can be used for different purposes, including cataloguing, teaching, engraving or arranging an existing composition. How is, for instance, a MusicXML file constructed? It has a hierarchical structure, like sheet music, which is made up of pages, systems, staves, measures and notes and symbols. The representation of certain instruments requires more care than others.
Besides strictly musical information, musical metadata cannot be described as musical events. Metadata are massively used in the framework of music information retrieval and classification. They include general layers that point towards files that do not represent music but that provide further information related to the origin of the music, like names of composers and performers, year of creation, genre, owners (music publishers and labels), etc. In brief, metadata are pieces of cultural information presenting the contexts in which a specific piece of music was created. Sometimes, they include images.
That is to say that musical metadata are an important source of revenue, now that the music industry has entered the digital era. And as numerous streaming platforms exist and as a lot of music labels have to publish it on many of them, the extraction of these metadata must be easy and fast so that they can be published online, shared with streaming platforms by individual composers and music corporations. Music streaming sites are platforms developed by programmers. And other platforms are created by other programmers to implement musical data and metadata everywhere quickly, whether they are proprietary or open.
THE DESCRIPTION OF MUSIC IN THE AGE OF COMPUTING