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Comment by intalentive | Hacker News Reader

There are different ways to measure complexity: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0067... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/

Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive.

Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.

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> Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.

You should see how much time EDM producers spend tweaking the waveforms of individual percussion hits. The idea that timbre in modern music is _less_ complex than in the past is just mind boggling to me, given the level of control that people have in sculpting waveforms and samples. There are entire EDM tracks that are basically just atonal explorations of timbre.

I think it goes both ways. Some do spend insane amounts of time on individual hits or compositing sounds to various functional points.

You can also get the same thing looped 4x that has no variation. Hard to fault either side. Musicians have to get work out rapidly and then occasionally something gets legs.

> Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles

The most popular genre in America (the world?) isn’t sung and doesn’t focus on tone, so this is hardly surprising. I bet if you measured rhythmic complexity or lyrical complexity it’d show the opposite.

We're running out of chords. They've all been mined. We can't make new ones.

I notice that the authors of that paper are two physicists and a data scientist. I wonder if they even consulted a musicologist or a composer with a background in research before publishing this paper. What would you think about a paper on programming that featured no computer scientists?

> Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive.

The Beatles used three chord progressions for everything with very little variation.

Modern music has far more variety.

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