Re: [LAU] OT: Subconscious Affecting Music

On Thursday 26 August 2010 08:38, Patrick Shirkey wrote: I started going out to clubs regularly in about 1990 and those elements were already there. The beats have evolved over the decades but I even remember hearing New Order remixes from the late 80s with the suggestive, breathy female vocal samples... not to mention everything ever produced by Enigma from '91 on.

I would argue that what you're describing goes as far back as disco, and it's the ascendancy of club culture in the present day that attracted your attention to it. Of course they all have pretty much the same beat. So did disco. So did electronic pop in the mid-80s. So did house music. I knew someone who got really, really turned on by a remix of the throwaway novelty single "People Are Still Having Sex" about 20 years ago. It had the same beat as everything else at the time so it was in everyone's mix for a couple of months, and featured the sound of a woman whispering "Hello, lover" repeatedly throughout the track.

On the other hand, 10 years before that, when I was still in elementary school, I had a girlfriend whose dad had a tape of disco stuff that all sounded like "More More More" by Andrea True Connection, but with fewer lyrics and more moaning. He was embarrassed when we made fun of it, leading me to suspect he was into it for not-purely-musical reasons. As you observed in your last post, the clubs I go to may not exactly be mainstream, and certainly most of the people there aren't going to react sexually to breathy female anything. But that stuff still gets played, often gets played there long before DJs in what you describe as mainstream clubs have even heard of it, and has been for decades. Timbaland may have added his own spin to it, but so did Giorgio Moroder (who may have invented the model), Stock/Aitken/Waterman, and so on through the years. In another couple years someone will come up with an even 'sexier' beat and bassline and even breathier female vocal talent, and someone else will be wishing he could use the same technique for, er, 'good'. I can't speak to the aggressive hip-hop stuff, because I generally leave if too much of that stuff gets played.

To sum up, I think the best way to positively affect people's lives through music isn't to try to come up with some scientific formula for imparting intelligence, tolerance, etc. subliminally through beats, but through writing songs embodying the qualities you wish to impart. Make them close enough in sound to everything else that they slip underneath the radar while also being catchy and novel enough so that everyone (well, everyone who plays non-major-label stuff) plays them. I think that'll be easier and more effective than finding and subverting a magic formula.