Popular Music Recordings Research Articles

Repertoire Communities in American Popular Music, 1900–1949

What are the social factors shaping musical repertoires? This paper analyzes repertoires as social relations among performers, refracted through factors such as the organization of industry, genres, race, and gender. Using data from American popular music recordings, performers and songs are treated as a two-mode network and repertoire communities are operationalized as bicliques. The production of culture perspective, the sociology of genres, and theories of race and gender imply hypotheses that are tested diachronically. Analysis finds support for the first two, with genres becoming the strongest basis of repertoire community membership while race and gender are surprisingly weak. Importantly, these factors worked in tandem as reflexive mechanisms for each other. The repertoire community system documents the rise of genre as the primary means of categorizing American popular music in the early twentieth century and mediated the effect of other factors.

A New Take on Cataloging Popular Music Recordings

Cataloging popular music audio formats such as compact discs and LPs has always required different procedures from cataloging Western art music recordings. Bibliographic records and standards have changed during the past twenty years and catalogers have switched from using Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) to Resource Description and Access (RDA). This article will illustrate changes in popular music cataloging since the 2001 publication of Terry Simpkins’ article “Cataloging Popular Music Recordings.” Additional issues such as name authority and subject authority creation have been included, as well as new codes and MARC tags being used in bibliographic records.

DETECTION ALGORITHMS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR PARTICIPATION: THE CASE OF MASHUPS

‘Mashup’ is a form of music that, in its use of samples from existing popular music recordings, has often been seen as an exemplar of the participatory cultural environment that many expected the internet to foster. It is a musical form that remains widely produced and consumed today. However, the contemporary internet is a complex environment for media distribution, with dominant platforms making use of a wide range of automatic and algorithmic regulatory tools in order to police, monitor, and remove unwelcome content – including that which is seen, rightly or wrongly, as copyright infringing. Drawing on recent empirical research on and with mashup producers – including 30 semi-structured interviews and an extensive survey (n=92) – this article explores the impact of platform regulation on mashup music today. It concludes that current regulation has significant stifling effects on this kind of remix creativity, including a substantial impact on where mashup producers distribute their music, on the aesthetics of their music, and – most pertinently – on their overall motivation to create. Having outlined these key findings, we argue that the ‘shutdown’ status of mashup producers raises profound questions concerning the balance between regulating online content in terms of protecting the artists’ rights, and cultivating participation and culturally valuable artistic expression. As such, this paper offers a timely contribution to scholarship on the complex relationship between popular music and new media in its critical exploration of internet’s detection algorithms and their implications for mashup music and cultural participation more generally.

Semantic Tagging of Singing Voices in Popular Music Recordings

Singing voice is a key sound source in popular music. As recent music streaming and entertainment services call for more intelligent solutions to retrieve songs or evaluate musical characteristics, automatic analysis of popular music targeted to singing voice has been a significant research subject. The majority of studies have focused on quantitative or objective information of singing voice such as pitch, lyrics or singer identity. However, singing voice has a wide variety of dimensions that are somewhat difficult to quantify and therefore we often describe by words. In this article, we address the qualitative analysis of singing voice as a music auto-tagging task that annotates songs with a set of tag words. To this end, we build a music tag dataset dedicated to singing voice. Specifically, we define a vocabulary that describes timbre and singing styles of K-pop vocalists and collect human annotations for individual tracks. We then conduct statistical analysis to understand the global and temporal characteristics of the tag words. Using the dataset, we train a deep neural network model to automatically predict the voice-specific tags from popular music recordings and evaluate the model in different conditions. We discuss the results by comparing them to the statistical analysis of tag words. Finally, we show potential applications of the vocal tagging system in music retrieval, music thumbnailing and singing evaluation.

Local Key Estimation in Music Recordings: A Case Study Across Songs, Versions, and Annotators

While global key and chord estimation for both popular and classical music recordings have received a lot of attention, little research has been devoted to estimating the local key for classical music. Partly, this may be due to its inherent ambiguity and subjectivity, which makes annotating local keys a challenging task. In this article, we approach local key estimation with a cross-version dataset comprising nine performances (versions) of Schubert's song cycle Winterreise annotated by three different music theory experts. We consider two baseline methods that are representative for common types of signal processing algorithms: an HMM-based system and a CNN-based approach. For both models, we employ a similar training procedure including the optimization of hyperparameters on a validation split. We systematically evaluate the model predictions and provide musical explanations for key confusions. As a central contribution, we explore how different training-test splits affect the models' efficacy. Splitting along the song axis, we find that both methods perform similarly well. Splitting along the version axis, we obtain substantially higher accuracies, especially for the CNN, which seems to effectively learn the harmonic progressions of the songs (“cover song effect”) and successfully generalizes to unseen versions. We further discuss the results for several songs in detail and assess our results from the perspective of multiple annotators. This cross-annotator study reveals that a substantial part of the systems' errors coincides with annotator disagreement and an even larger part can be traced back to musically explainable relationships among different keys.

Increased levels of bass in popular music recordings 1955-2016 and their relation to loudness.

The sound of recorded music has changed over time. These changes can be captured by different audio features. Over the past decades, popular songs have shown clear increases in RMS energy and loudness, but far less attention has addressed whether this upward trend is more prevalent in specific frequency bands, such as the bass. Bass frequencies are especially important for movement induction, such as foot tapping or dancing, and might offer competitive advantages of capturing attention and increasing engagement. Here, the authors examined the evolution of audio features, such as root-mean-square (RMS) energy, loudness, and spectral fluctuations (changes in the audio signal's frequency content) in ten frequency bands from songs on the Billboard Hot 100 charts from 1955 to 2016. Over time, RMS energy and loudness increased while dynamic range decreased. The largest increases were found in the bass range: Spectral flux increased most strongly in the lowest frequency bands (0-100 Hz), and when controlling for overall RMS, only the lowest frequency bands showed an increase over time. The upward trend of bass could reflect changes in technology and style; but based on links between bass and movement, it is likely a widespread technique to increase engagement and contribute to chart success.

The The skillset of professional studio musicians in the German popular music recording industry

Among the professional roles in the recording industry, studio musicians have received relatively little academic attention. Who has played on a record and who has developed the rhythms, melodies and fills are secrets that remain hidden behind closed studio doors. Since the little public media available mainly recollects memories of past stars or musical developments from more than twenty years ago, little is known about more recent biographies, individual skills and working practices of average studio musicians from different parts of the world. Against this backdrop, the present study explored the skillset of studio musicians in Germany’s popular music recording industry. The interviewees provided rare insights into their careers, expressed their views on technological developments and depicted their economic realities. With increasing power and affordability of music production resources, new business models for studio musicians were developing along with a change of skills. For a long time, the successful studio musician had incredible playing skills, stylistic flexibility and was an excellent sight-reader. These requirements seem to have shifted; today’s musicians must have a broader skillset and be experts beyond their instruments. A repertoire of ideas and sounds to be offered spontaneously in a recording session are highly valuable next to empathy, social skills and a likeable and humble personality. The musicians must be both unique and flexible to serve a project and compete with the many fellow musicians and programmers of computer instruments.

The Work Realities of Professional Studio Musicians in the German Popular Music Recording Industry: Careers, Practices and Economic Situations

Among the professional roles in the recording industry, studio musicians have received relatively little academic attention. The present study explores the work realities of professional studio musicians in Germany, one of the largest music industries in the world, and is based on interviews with six pop musicians; guitarists, bassists, keyboardists and drummers who are between 27 and 66 years old. The findings show how changes in the recording industry - most notably dwindling budgets, the rise of project studios and virtual collaboration - have affected working practices, skill requirements and business models. The findings indicate that in Germany it is hardly possible to make a living from studio work as a professional musician. This is true even for leading session players. Sinking fees and the lack of access to royalties pose a problem that is not tackled due to fierce competition and the risk of damaging one’s reputation.

A spin to spark creativity: The role of early Jamaican popular music recordings in Los Angeles’ traditional ska scene

Abstract In the late 1980s, a revival movement dedicated to 1960s Jamaican popular music began taking shape in Los Angeles, CA. Hepcat and Jump With Joey were two bands at the forefront of this movement, playing their own interpretations of Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae, interlaced with genealogically related influences. Using oral history interviews I conducted with band members, I analyse the role of recorded media in shaping Angeleno adaptations of 1960s Jamaican popular music. In doing so, I highlight how audio recordings help stimulate cross-cultural and inter-generational communication and explore the complexities of music revival subcultures and generic classifications.

The Filmmaker as DJ

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) is structured around a compiled score of almost sixty popular music recordings. Scorsese himself, working with editor Thelma Schoonmaker and using digital editing tools for the first time, assembled and arranged a diverse body of pre-existing music into a unified score that plays for more than two of the film’s three hours. This article offers a close analysis of Scorsese acting as composer—crafting Casino’s compiled score in the manner of a DJ—and, in reciprocal fashion, editing film images and narrative to recorded music. Casino demonstrates highly varied, multivalent relationships between musical form and film form. Indeed, musical form proves a constituent element of Casino’s construction at multiple levels of magnification. The large-scale form of the score as a whole articulates the larger arc of Casino’s dual narrative. The strategic deployment of musical styles (from jazz to rock to pop) and the targeted use of lyrics as voiceover (often subtly deploying aspects of racial performance in popular styles) serve to differentiate narrative strands and fill out otherwise unspoken characterization. Scorsese builds several sequences in Casino on a direct, often audible relationship between song forms and narrative unfolding, creating song scenes in which compiled tracks heard as musical wholes grant a musical shape to discrete narrative units. Casino’s complex use of music does not, however, penetrate the inner lives of the film’s three primary characters, who seem unaware of the musical flow Scorsese employs to set their story dancing. The analysis draws upon the filmmaker’s own words about his creative process and offers select comparisons to other Scorsese films with compiled scores.

Audio quality in everyday listening situations

The quality of digital audio which uses a form of lossy data compression is in the focus of several studies. The experimental focus of these studies includes the fundamental difference between objective and subjective measurement methods (Pocta & Beerends, 2015), test standards (Breebaart, 2015), or signal processing (Khaldi et al., 2013; Jung et al., 2016). But there are only few studies concerning the impact of perceived quality differences in everyday listening situations (ELS). Short excerpts of recent popular music recordings were encoded with different bit rates based on codecs that are commonly used by popular music streaming services. While the encoded files were presented via standard Samsung in-ear headphones, the everyday listening situation was simulated by using binaural recordings of a shopping mall soundscape that was simultaneously presented via Stax electrostatic headphones. In a control condition no soundscape was used. The stimuli were rated by 30 participants in a MUSHRA listening test (ITU-R BS.1534). A repeated measures ANOVA showed that there are significant differences for both conditions concerning the different stimuli (ELS: F(10,20) = 25.237, p = .0001, μ² = .927; no ELS: F(10,20) = 51.073, p = .0001, μ² = .962), but the effect sizes are consistently smaller in the condition with simulated everyday listening situation. The difference between both conditions gets smaller, the lower the bit rates are. A follow-up study additionally includes binaural audio that is currently used by radio stations.

What the [bleep]? Enhanced absolute pitch memory for a 1000 Hz sine tone

Many individuals are able to perceive when the tuning of familiar stimuli, such as popular music recordings, has been altered. This suggests a kind of ubiquitous pitch memory, though it is unclear how this ability differs across individuals with and without absolute pitch (AP) and whether it plays any role in AP. In the present study, we take advantage of a salient single frequency – the 1000Hz sine tone used to censor taboo words in broadcast media – to assess the nature of this kind of pitch memory across individuals with and without AP. We show that non-AP participants are accurate at selecting the correct version of the censor tone among incorrect versions shifted by either one or two semitones, though their accuracy was still below that of an AP population (Experiment 1). This suggests a benefit for AP listeners that could be due to the use of explicit note categories or greater amounts of musical training. However, AP possessors still outperformed all non-AP participants when incorrect versions of the censor tone were shifted within a note category, even when controlling for musical experience (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 demonstrated that AP listeners did not appear to possess a category label for the censor tone that could have helped them differentiate the censor tones used in Experiment 2. Overall, these results suggest that AP possessors may have better pitch memory, even when divorced from pitch labeling (note categories). As such, these results have implications for how AP may develop and be maintained.

Fluctuations of hi-hat timing and dynamics in a virtuoso drum track of a popular music recording.

Long-range correlated temporal fluctuations in the beats of musical rhythms are an inevitable consequence of human action. According to recent studies, such fluctuations also lead to a favored listening experience. The scaling laws of amplitude variations in rhythms, however, are widely unknown. Here we use highly sensitive onset detection and time series analysis to study the amplitude and temporal fluctuations of Jeff Porcaro’s one-handed hi-hat pattern in “I Keep Forgettin’”—one of the most renowned 16th note patterns in modern drumming. We show that fluctuations of hi-hat amplitudes and interbeat intervals (times between hits) have clear long-range correlations and short-range anticorrelations separated by a characteristic time scale. In addition, we detect subtle features in Porcaro’s drumming such as small drifts in the 16th note pulse and non-trivial periodic two-bar patterns in both hi-hat amplitudes and intervals. Through this investigation we introduce a step towards statistical studies of the 20th and 21st century music recordings in the framework of complex systems. Our analysis has direct applications to the development of drum machines and to drumming pedagogy.

Deborah Pacini-Hernandez. Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music

Deborah Pacini-Hernandez. 2010. Oye Como Va!: Hybridity and Identity in Popular Music. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Despite the fact that the number of Latin American immigrants and persons of Latin decent in the United States has increased significantly in the last two decades, mainstream mass media and academia have often neglected the contributions of these communities to US popular culture, and especially to music. However, this trend seems to be changing in the past few years with the production of documentaries such as Latin Music USA (aired in 2009 on PBS), and the increasing publication of academic books that focus on specific music genres performed by Latinos (eg. Ragland 2009; Rivera, et al. 2009; Washburne 2008). With Oye Como Va!, Deborah Pacini-Hernandez contributes to the literature on music and culture by blending sophisticated and comprehensive socio-cultural analysis of several music genres performed by Latinos such as rock, salsa, meregue, reggaeton, hiphop, and cumbia, along with basic histories of the genres and a tracing of their multiple interconnections. As an anthropologist, Pacini-Hernandez's is primarily concerned with the question of identity formation through popular music performance, recording, marketing, and reception. Since most of this music emerge from the crossroads of transnational flows of music and people from different nations in the Caribbean and the Americas, she provides a comparative and connective history of national and transnational music genres and their transformation in relation to cultural, social, economical, and political processes primarily within the United States, and also the Americas. Thus, the book's main interest groups would be those within academia, especially anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and cultural studies scholars, interested in American and Studies, and those who study mass-mediated popular music in the United States; yet, it is accessible for the general reader. Pacini-Hernandez uses the term to name the people of Latin American descent who grew up in the United States; nevertheless, above all, she acknowledges the cultural heterogeneity of this population and the tensions within it. Throughout the book, she recognizes that these tensions often emerge from the fact that many Latinos belong to bilingual and racial minorities, and at the same time, are Americans and participants in US mainstream popular culture. This is not a fine-grained analysis of one musical genre in its immigrant communities, but rather a macroscopic view of music, acknowledging its diversity while unveiling another set of tensions that emerge from the different origins, population size, and visibility of the different communities in the United States. Pacini-Hernandez does not conflate the distinct nationalities and cultural heritage of Latin American immigrants and their descendants, but rather acknowledges their differences, similarities, and the tensions that complicate the general idea of a unified Latino cultural identity. Nonetheless, the book focuses primarily on the music and histories of Latinos whose music has had a significant impact in North American mainstream popular culture and elsewhere. Therefore, she focuses primarily on those Latinos of Puerto Rican and Mexican origin, the two groups with the largest presence in the United States; but Pacini-Hernandez also includes chapters on the music and experiences of recent migration waves of Dominicans and Colombians, and how their music has transformed and responded to previous waves of immigration. However, in a few chapters she touches on the role of Cubans and their music, both of which have had a great impact in American popular culture. In the first chapter, which serves as a theoretical introduction, Pacini-Hernandez approaches the question of identity formation through popular music. She states that music, a result of the crossing and in-betweeness of musical, geographic, racial, and ethnic boundaries, should be analyzed in terms of the multiple transnational flows of people and culture, the engagement of Latinos with US mainstream culture and music industry, and Latin American hybridity. …

The Sound of Moog: Using Vinyl Recordings to Reconstruct a History of the Moog Synthesizer

Original vinyl recordings of popular music provide a rich source of data to supplement other historical research. Vintage recordings and associated liner notes provide details about the chronologic, geographic, biographic, and artistic elements that contribute to an understanding of music, music technology, and popular culture of the time. Information derived from a study of vinyl music recordings can fortify and supplement other forms of research in popular culture, artists, and music. I have undertaken a project to archive every commercial recording made using the Moog Modular Synthesizer between the years 1967 and 1970. This study represents my initial findings regarding The Sound of Moog project, which focuses on the influence of this early synthesizer on popular music, culture, and industry. The central question behind my research is: What can we learn about the history and influence of the Moog Synthesizer by examining the recordings of the early adopters of this technology? In this study, I explore general methods of discographic practice in organizing data from vintage vinyl recordings, address the issue of dating popular music recordings, and illustrate that research derived from recordings adds unique findings and insight to historical research.

Perceptual Effects of Dynamic Range Compression in Popular Music Recordings

Perceptual Effects of Dynamic Range Compression in Popular Music Recordings

국악기 근접 마이크로폰 테크닉스를 위한 연구 (가야금, 해금, 대금, 꽹과리)

This study recorded the sound of Korean traditional musical instruments by considering the radiation characteristics of traditional Korean musical instruments and setting the diverse mounting angle and distance of microphone. By following recorded results, the study analyzes the optimum position of microphone and the characteristic of timbre through frequency range spectrum and repeated listening. This experiment of study is for technique of close microphone which is used in popular music, therefore it is recorded in the popular music recording studio. The study also suggests the optimum position for the microphone to record, and explains the difference of timbre at different position. The result of study will suggest the best technique of Close Microphone Techniques for Korean Traditional Musical Instruments not only to accurately express the beautiful and unique sound of traditional Korean musical instruments but also to obtain diverse timbre.

Singer identification based on computational auditory scene analysis and missing feature methods

A major challenge for the identification of singers from monaural popular music recording is to remove or alleviate the influence of accompaniments. Our system is realized in two stages. In the first stage, we exploit computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) to segregate the singing voice units from a mixture signal. First, the pitch of singing voice is estimated to extract the pitch-based features of each unit in an acoustic vector. These features are then exploited to estimate the binary time-frequency (T-F) masks, where 1 indicates that the corresponding T-F unit is dominated by the singing voice, and 0 indicates otherwise. These regions dominated by the singing voice are considered reliable, and other units are unreliable or missing. Thus the acoustic vector is incomplete. In the second stage, two missing feature methods, the reconstruction of acoustic vector and the marginalization, are used to identify the singer by dealing with the incomplete acoustic vectors. For the reconstruction of acoustic vector, the complete acoustic vector is first reconstructed and then converted to obtain the Gammatone frequency cepstral coefficients (GFCCs), which are further used to identify the singer. For the marginalization, the probabilities that the voice belonging to a certain singer are computed on the basis of only the reliable components. We find that the reconstruction method outperforms the marginalization method, while both methods have significantly good performances, especially at signal-to-accompaniment ratios (SARs) of 0 dB and ??3 dB, in contrast to another system.

Imperfect sound forever: loudness wars, listening formations and the history of sound reproduction

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to provide some historical perspective on the so-called loudness war. Critics of the loudness war maintain that the average volume level of popular music recordings has increased dramatically since the proliferation of digital technology in the 1980s, and that this increase has had detrimental effects on sound quality and the listening experience. My point is not to weigh in on this debate, but to suggest that the issue of loudness in sound recording and playback can be traced back much earlier than the 1980s. In fact, loudness has been a source of pleasure, a target of criticism, and an engine of technological change since the very earliest days of commercial sound reproduction. Looking at the period between the turn-of-the-century format feud and the arrival of electrical amplification in the 1920s, I situate the loudness war within a longer historical trajectory, and demonstrate a variety of ways in which loudness and volume have been controversial issues in – and constitutive elements of – the history of sound reproduction. I suggest that the loudness war can be understood in relation to a broader cultural history of volume.

A Robust Fitness Measure for Capturing Repetitions in Music Recordings With Applications to Audio Thumbnailing

The automatic extraction of structural information from music recordings constitutes a central research topic. In this paper, we deal with a subproblem of audio structure analysis called audio thumbnailing with the goal to determine the audio segment that best represents a given music recording. Typically, such a segment has many (approximate) repetitions covering large parts of the recording. As the main technical contribution, we introduce a novel fitness measure that assigns a fitness value to each segment that expresses how much and how well the segment “explains” the repetitive structure of the entire recording. The thumbnail is then defined to be the fitness-maximizing segment. To compute the fitness measure, we describe an optimization scheme that jointly performs two error-prone steps, path extraction and grouping, which are usually performed successively. As a result, our approach is even able to cope with strong musical and acoustic variations that may occur within and across related segments. As a further contribution, we introduce the concept of fitness scape plots that reveal global structural properties of an entire recording. Finally, to show the robustness and practicability of our thumbnailing approach, we present various experiments based on different audio collections that comprise popular music, classical music, and folk song field recordings.