[LAU] Study Finds New Pop Music Does All Sound the Same.

[Simon Wise]

On 07/08/12 09:59, Len Ovens wrote:
>
> On Mon, August 6, 2012 2:57 pm, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>>>> I suspect the percentage of people actively recording and performing
>>>> music is a lot lower. Back in Bach's time, everyone was expected to
>>>> be able to sing, for instance.
>>
>>> citation? i seriously doubt this. perhaps the more monied classes, but
>>> not the population as  whole.

not sure about the monied bit ... singing is cheap, and many people take some 
part in social activities ... with or without money.

plus singing and music have been part of rituals almost everywhere, including 
church ones in christian places ... and in that time church was very much part 
of most peoples life. Or here in Australia music and dance has been an important 
way of keeping stories and history told for maybe 50 thousand years. Some say 
that the big animals that became extinct soon after people first arrived here 
are still recorded in those songs, but also much more recent history is to ... a 
show I was involved with a few years ago had a series of traditional pieces from 
the islands north of Darwin, and one depicted the bombing of the station there 
by Japanese planes on their way to Darwin. The dancers depicted planes and the 
action in exactly the same style as they had depicted the animals in the other 
stories, this dance was 50 or 60 years old when I saw it. Everyone takes part in 
those occasions, in many cultures.

There is a fascinating chapter at the start of:

"The Information: : A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick, 2011

describing the music/language of the talking drums in parts of africa - how the 
way the 2 tones of the drums are used to encode news and information in a way 
that has lots of redundancy and built in error correction so the message can be 
passed through many hands and not get confused along the way. The drummers 
certainly had quite a lot of training, but the intricate encoding was read by 
everyone. Music plays a lot of different roles, it is a very old part of human 
culture.




Simon