Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 2 May 2022 at 13:44:24 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> I don't think there is any real reason to trust one own taste, 
> as taste is socially constructed (cf. La Distinction from 
> Bourdieu) and - simplifying - it reflects too much of your 
> socioeconomic background to be significative. Music in 
> particular particularly reflects that.

I understand what you say, but in regard to aesthetical analysis 
you can think in terms of multiple dimensions. Some music is 
"meaningful" or "complex" in many dimensions.

Socioeconomic matters, but take Eurovision or TV singer contests. 
When you take the average of everyones taste you end up with 
not-very-interesting-music, at best engaging entertainment. I was 
recently very disappointed in the Norwegian version of The Voice, 
there were some phenomenal singers, the professional jury 
celebrated them, but when the viewers get to vote, they voted for 
the guy that song a boring Beatles rendition or the singer with 
good dance moves… Basically, the good technical vocalists were 
voted out.

I guess we can discuss the merits of taste, but if "all muscians" 
would pick one and the majority of "non-musicians" pick another 
there are some objective aspects to taste that go beyond 
"socioeconomic" reasons.


> French hiphop was amazing (and is popular) from 2017 to ~2021 
> but I don't think we have something interesting otherwise. 
> French electro is much less interesting than the Argentinian 
> progressive house scene for example, and that's just my opinion 
> again.

Thanks for the tip, I'll try to find Argentinian progressive 
house. Latin producers often add a new flare to dance-oriented 
genres. (Not to mention the top hip-hop mixing duo Latin Rascals 
in the 80s, still worth a listen, in my opinion.).


> A lot of good music gets produced in niches, to get completely 
> ignored nowadays, so it would be hard to say what scene is 
> interesting ; we all get to miss it anyway.

It is difficult to be visible when 50000 songs are released every 
day? (Or was it a different number? Something huge anyway.). It 
is quite mind blowing how transformative capable home computers 
have been.


> Oversampling typically produces:
> A. a phase shift
> B. anti-aliasing

I don't think I understand what you mean by oversampling. Why 
does sampling at 96kHz instead of 48kHz have any sonic impact? It 
shouldn't?


> The by-product becomes more desirable than the non-problem it 
> solves. Now everyone wants the feature!

This is new to me, is this related to some of your plugins? Got a 
link?


> I had a strange conversation about Autotune once with a 20 
> years old:
> - an heavily autotuned voice sounded "normal" and not-autotuned 
> to her
> - but the _talkbox_ in Kavinsky - Nightcall sounded ugly to her 
> and "autotuned". She mentionned of course she didn't like the 
> Autotune. But was unable to identify it in practice.

Maybe there is an increasing gap in music perception between 
people who create music as a hobby (or pros) and the average 
person? Last year [this singer]( 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAqMMKqmdfY) performed on The 
Voice Norway without any pitch-effects, and of course some would 
insist that it was Autotune.

(That Nightcall-song reminds me of an analog 8-channel vocoder I 
built from a mail-order DIY kit back in the days, from a tiny 
company called [PAiA](https://paia.com/). :-)