Re: GG: Humming; Cher

[jerry and judy <jerbidoc@zianet.com>]

>On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, jv wrote:
>
>> I think we all agree that percussion instruments such
>> as the piano have proved the easiest to synthesize convincingly;
>> probably the last things to fall to the Digital Conquerer will be the
>> violin and the human voice, but the day will come when we will hear from
>> our CD players beautiful singing voices, completely human and endowed
>> with personality, of people who do not exist.  Imagine starting with a
>> real person's voice, but digitally altering, step by step, extremely
>> fine nuances of its pitch, timbre, frequency profile, etc. etc.  The end
>> result could be utterly different, much less attractive - or much MORE
>> attractive.
>
>In Cher's hit single "Believe" there's that very odd processing of her
>voice in parts of the song: it sounds as if she held a single note, they
>sampled it, and then they slide it around from step to step (discretely
>stepwise, not sliding).  It sounds blatantly artificial.
>
>Now, was that a deliberate artistic choice for the effect of the
>stepwise-ness, or has Cher forgotten how to sing, or is her producer just
>very sloppy?  (Anybody here happen to have inside information on this?)
>I'd hope it's a deliberate effect....
>
>Bradley Lehman | http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/ | Dayton, VA, USA


Musical ideas in popular music have been 'degenerating', since their peak
of sophistication (a relative term) in the 30's and 40's, because of the
very nature of the popular arts (which in itself is a contradiction).

What's temporarily popular and what's durable in high quality art tend to
corrode eachother in short and long cycles, but inevitably on a long
running basis.  The reason for this is that the popular arts aren't
'meaningful' enough to 'mature humans' to be self-justifying.  They need to
be commercially justifying, and along with that, they need to appeal to an
inexperienced and fickle, young, peer-pressured audience.  The way this is
accomplished in the short cycles, the cycles which match the eight or so
years which it takes to mature as a musical consumer, is through the
interjection of shots of increasing ambiguity.

Now, ALL the arts rely on this seemingly never-ending fount of artistic
(emotional) appeal (the source of all developing art, the increased but
contrained ambiguity of its basic elements).  The curious thing about
popular music is that its creators intuitively understand that increased
harmonic ambiguity will be rejected by their youthful audience, who
naturally just want to be reassured and not challenged.   So they have
injected ambiguity mainly into their pop rhythms and the pop 'sounds' (new
instruments and new technologies etc.) of their product, but they've left
harmony and form and contrapuntal ambiguities to a few rare experiments
(some were successful, Stairway to Heaven leaps to mind, but that's an
example of the limit for quality musical ambiguities).

BUT one area in which popular music has become very ambiguous, and
therefore very attractive to young people, is in the text of the songs
(lyrics) and in its presentation.  This is the one area where ambiguity can
be fully released without fear of losing the audience! (up to a point).
This continuous trend probably started in the 50's with the fast (heavy
dialect) rock-a-billy and blues material.  The sound-effect (nonsense)
vocalizations of the late 50's and early 60's came next.  When amplified
instruments became acceptable, they could be used to drown out inane and
repetitive lyrics.  This fascinated the young followers at the time,
because they thought they were missing out on something profound, or in
their own minds -they heard something 'profound', but in actuality it
generally wasn't even in there! <grin>  This is the highest level and goal
of artistic ambiguity!!, to inspire the receiver with all the
'possibilities' in the art or medium.

Then on through the 70's disco distraction (lyrics were subtler and
difficult to decipher).  Techno Pop, Heavy Metal, Grunge etc. continued the
successful trend.  If it works why change it?

So now we come to the greatest 'change' in decades!  Rap!  The 'music' is
totally secondary, repetitive and unambiguous, almost minimalistic.  The
'melody' is sing-songy and easy to follow.  But the words are ambiguous on
so many levels, street talk, slang, truncations, forced rhymings, and there
are very few exact repeats!  AND on the level of 'meaning', total
ambiguity!!!  Talking about violence and revenge, all manner of nasty
situations, but not really 'meaning' anything 'specific' by them.  Social
and cultural ambiguity in art, it captivates the young and the rebellious,
idealistic spirit.  It's Beatlemania again, but this time it's serious!

Jerry