For when I get bored and want to talk about music...

[Moonface]

I see. So now I'm curious, what instrument is the easiest to do higher BPM on and what's the hardest? Or rather, what instrument is fastest and what's slowest?

[Maniakkid25]

UUUUUUUUUUUUUH...

So, the problem with that question is that there are more factors than just the instrument itself. The player, the technique, and the rhythm in question are all going to be factors. I mean, if I could isolate down to physiology alone, my bet would be some kind of stringed or percussion instrument, but that barely narrows it down! A guitar is going to be a lot easier to shred on than a bass, but that's due to the physical geometry of the instrument (frets have wider spacing, strings are thicker, etc.), and its not impossible for a bass player to be faster than their guitarist buddies. Les Claypool, John Myung, and Geddy Lee are all virtuosoes on the bass. And that's just one factor that can throw a wrench into that question. And this just all assumes that we are talking about human-played instruments! This is a simple question that doesn't have a simple answer.

[Moonface]

Ah, I assumed that if you boiled it down to the instrument itself and what would be capable with it ignorant of physical limits and just the limits of the instrument itself (like a piano will never be played faster than a guitar unless you spam a small number of keys) that it wouldn't be a complicated thing.

Is there any particular BPM that is avoided because it just doesn't sound pleasant? I know the faster ones become blurred, but I was wondering if there's a certain BPM range that isn't common because the human ear dislikes the timing of it.

[Maniakkid25]

Not that I'm aware of. Outside of notes blurring into a tone giving a headache, the only other example I can think of is below 33 BPM. At that point, the brain can't keep track of the steady pulse, and it just becomes a random noise popping in and out. But there's no magic "This tempo will make your heart feel like its in a vice" tempo. Speed of music helps with sounding harder, though, and "music hardness" is a WHOLE nother subject on it's own. I'm at work while I type this, so I'm not gonna do that write up right now.

[Moonface]

I'm not sure if you'd know the answer to this at all or have an idea of how people do this if it's a musical knowledge/skill thingy, but I had a thought last night wondering how do things like movies, TV shows, games, etc. with licensed soundtracks find songs that fit what's happening, or even just songs that are perhaps rather obscure? For example, an episode of Loki I watched last night had this as the credits song:



I feel like it's a song that wouldn't have been picked out because it's some well known popular hit, so is it just some music guru who knows a lot about different songs having the knowledge to think of that song, or does someone browse a library of lyrics or genres just going through song after song until they hit the jackpot? Just wondering how such things are picked out. XD

[Maniakkid25]

As far as I know, serendipity is how licensed soundtracks happen. Someone on the production team knows a song, says "hey, this'll work here," and when the higher-ups agree, they slot it in. I mean, that's how "Oh Yeah" by Yello ended up on Ferris Bueller's Day Off, anyway. That's a song by a band who pretty much excelled in sound collage and weird as hell synth music (and not even synth-pop), so how it got on John Hughes' radar, no one knows. And yet, it is now a staple of cinema, used as an audio cue to describe lust, greed, and absolutely-disgusting-wanting-of-this-thing.

It's things like this that lead to surprise hits that peak on Billboard years after initial release. "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" didn't chart in the US until 5 years after initial release, thanks to its use in Benny & Joon, after all.

[Moonface]

Ah, so it is just generally someone sharing their obscure taste in music as it fits in a similar vein to someone making a reference to something that might not be mainstream but they know it and determined it was fitting to use it at a certain time. I suppose it's easier if a movie company also has a music label, such as Sony, because then they will have knowledge of a lot more songs due to everything just naturally coming through their label door.

[Moonface]

How hard is it to translate a song to another language? Can any song pull it off, or does the rhythm of the music or syllables in the words of the original language inhibit certain songs from being translated?

[Maniakkid25]

Translation from one langauge to another is already hard enough, given you have to navigate between a minefield of meaning versus intent (easy example: "Panzer" in german literally translates as "armor", but in modern contexts almost exclusively translates to "tank", as in the armored fighting vehicle). Translating a SONG?! Get the f*** out!

So, first off, there's what kind of sentence structure you have in the language. There are many forms, but the vast majority of languagez fall into one of two camps: SOV, and SVO. SVO is Subject, Verb, Object ("The boy kicked the ball."), and SOV is Subject, Object, Verb ("The boy the ball kicked"). That second sentence probably looks weird, because English is a SVO language, but it turns out that more languages are SOV than SVO (Japanese is one of them)! So right off the bat, the order of your words matters for the language you are trying to sing in, and you must account for it.

And even without rubbing up against things like "there is not a word in this language for this exact concept" (see the peculiar use of "Oppan" in Gangnam Style), or "This turn of phrase only makes sense in the specific region we are in" (see "Bouffe nos doigts" in Papaoutai), you have the style of singing itself. See, different languages are suited to different styles of singing, again in one of two major camps: Syllabic and Melismatic. If your singing is Syllabic, you tend to sing each different note and beat as a different syllable. But, if your singing is Melismatic, you are singing many different notes on the same syllable (on a played instrument, this would be known as a "slur" or "slide", depending on the instrument. Or "Glissando" if you wanna be fancy!). So, you basically stretch that one syllable across multiple beats, maybe even sliding around a scale or two.

Then, you have to consider that languages have different poetic rhythm. For instance: you cannot write a Limerick outside of English. No, seriously, go ahead and try; you will fail. Why? Because the rhythm of a Limerick ("There ONCE was a MAN from NanTUCKet...") was explicitly designed with English in mind. It's the reason why Italian speech is so easy to identify outside of any other context: the natural cadence of how words come out effect the actual language, and this is reflected in poetry.

And keep in mind, this is ALL before we've even translated a SINGLE WORD! That's right, we haven't even started changing the words into their equivalents, yet! This is why when you hear translated versions of songs, while they are enlightening if you don't speak the original language, they fall sort of...flat. Props to CUT_ [sic], who took trying to translate Papaoutai into English, and completely gave up trying to translate the "Bouffe nos doigts" line, and gave us "Sucked our fingers dry". Hey, they tried!

There is a reason that in Mass Effect, there is a datalog explicitly telling you that music tends to be instrumental-only to appeal to a galactic fanbase. You could not have written Smells Like Teen Spirit in any language other than English. You could not have written Gangnam Style in any language other than Korean. You could not have written 99 Luftballons in any language other than German. Not merely because the writers only knew that as their primary language (Nena took a stab at translating 99 Luftballons them selves, giving us 99 Red Balloons to keep the proper cadence), but because of the nature of translation itself. Hats off to the people who have to do this sort of work; I could never pull it off!

[ShiraNoMai]

There's one song in particular that I think was translated near perfectly into English from Korean: Wedding Dress by TAEYANG

The original:


The English version:



I just love how it's both coherent in its translation AND keeps to the rhythm and beat of the song, INCLUDING the original arrangement.

[Moonface]

@Maniakkid25: Do you think there is or will be any modern music that will be seen as significant or classic as currently classical music is seen? Or do you think music nowadays will just all gradually fade from public consciousness while the classical stuff remains common knowledge?

[Maniakkid25]

Neither. Before modern music can carry the mystique of "classical" music (which actually covers a broad range of genres and is just what we tend to throw orchestra-oriented music into), the state of music education and research needs to change. Right now, there are dedicated researchers looking into Blues, Rock, Rap, and Pop, but they are a vast minority in a snobbish world where the only "proper" music theory is the one developed over 300 years ago in Western Europe, and is very rarely used in modern popular music today. Hell, if you lock yourself into that mode of thought, then chord loops, blues harmony, and tritone usage outside of the Lydian mode not only make no sense, but are serious violations that should destroy the quality of a piece. Youtubers like Adam Neely and 12 Tone -- who are FAR more adept at this topic, mind -- have much more in-depth and hard-hitting videos on this topic of discussion.

For the immediacy, however, modern music's significance as music is about as possible as video games as art: no one wants to accept it, even though its absolutely true by any definition.

[Moonface]

Is there anything else considered for store music other than it being radio friendly? Like do certain tempos get favoured or particular tones?

[Maniakkid25]

That is a question better asked to someone higher up the food chain than I. Some stores don't even do the radio friendly bit, and some stores just play a radio station direct through the speakers, ads and all. But I imagine that "uptempo" (i.e. past 100 bpm) songs are preferred, as faster tempos generally mean that a song is more energetic and happier (unless its a metal song, but that's another story). I imagine curators have little-to-no knowledge of music theory or even WHAT THE SONG IS ABOUT, which leads to funny situations like Every Breath You Take (about a stalker), Human (about a cheating boyfriend), and Drops of Jupiter (about a mother dying from cancer), and those are just from personal experience! Seriously, make it a game sometime: go to a store, and just listen to the music coming out the speaker, and see what horrendous choices they have made.

[Moonface]

Oh I've heard some questionable songs on the Publix radio during shifts. Apparently the radio station used by them also plays the songs slightly faster at certain points of the day to subliminally encourage customers to shop faster. I expect it's used closer to when the store closes or maybe if the store is busy to try and get people in and out quicker and stop the store getting too crowded. I doubt it's something anyone would be able to notice though unless you're so in tune with the original tempo of a song that you notice it's slightly off.