Rather than link to a fan-made slide show to go with ‘Poker Face’, I’d link to the video for ‘Bad Romance’.
I know this kind of music isn’t aimed at people like me. It’s dance-floor filler for the download generation. That having been said, I think the song, the production, the vocals and the video are extremely impressive and represent a massive achievement in contemporary popular music.
To answer the OP, I don’t think one can say songs are ‘scientifically designed’ to be catchy, because even today commercial popularity can’t be reduced to a scientific formula.
It is true that there are many very experienced producers, engineers and artists working in popular music today. They have developed a large repertoire of techniques and tricks to made songs as commercially ‘catchy’ as possible, and this knowledge grows and evolves all the time. Those with the right knack of producing songs that prove popular can be very well-paid for their services, because they have a rare skill that can help to generate a lot of revenue.
However, this is not the whole story, and the process cannot be reduced to a science or a formula. There is still the ‘art’ side of the process, the creativity and vision and imagination to come up with something that the target market will respond to favourably. Only people who have never tried this could imagine it’s easy. It is anything but. I could give you access, right now, to all the same production team as used by Rihanna, Beyonce, Lady Gaga or any other chart Tsarina, and even get them to do the vocals for you, but if I asked you to come up with the basics of the song itself, you’d be very unlikely to come up with anything that would sell. It’s just monumentally difficult to do, and very few people have the right mindset.
Like Equipoise, and for pretty much the same reasons, I’d never heard any Lady Gaga either. So I clicked on your link, and… well, okay. No better or catchier than plenty of other songs.
If modern pop music really were scientifically designed to be catchy, you’d think it’d be significantly more catchy than older music from back before music production became scientifically advanced. Is it? I don’t think so; I think pop music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s is at least as catchy as what’s being made nowadays. But I may not be the fairest judge.
Just to elaborate on my comment, blues inflections are frequently found in modern pop music. Blues can be broadly defined as a blend of major and minor key elements. If you eliminate blues-influenced music, major keys are much more common than minor, true.
And then there are pop songs which don’t fit well in 18th Century diatonic scales at all, either modal or just “different”. This is especially true with songs that use open fifths (power chords), which are ambiguous without the defining factor, the 3rd. This is something often exploited to effect, and is similar to the blues which doesn’t so much omit the 3rd, but waffles with what kind of 3rd it is, or simultaneously sounding both major & minor.
Thank goodness this isn’t GD or GQ, or I’d have to give cites, but I’ll try to think of some examples.
“Eleanor Rigby” is a modal (dorian) one that immediately comes to mind. Another one is “Maniac.” The melody is lydian–or at least the first part of each verse is. “Just a small town girl on a Saturday night”, the “small town girl” notes are a raised fourth.
If you look to heavy metal, you’ll find all sorts of modal goodies in there (phrygian is particularly evident.)
I also had heard of Lady Gaga but had never listened to her music. I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on the quality of her song, as I don’t listen to this kind of stuff usually and it’s not something I’d ever listen to on my own. I can say that it sounds vaguely old fashioned to my ears and that the video-clip is amazing. Utterly incomprehensible to me but still fascinating. I also opened the Poker Face clip and feel I can say that the song sucked absolutely.
Dammit. Scratch that again. It’s in the synth intro that it has that major tonality. In the verses, my sheet music (yes, for some reason I have sheet music to this) has “Cb/Eb” but it sounds to my ears more like an Eb minor of some sort.
Not necessarily. We only remember the music that was catchy from those decades. And that music might have simply been the successful result of enough trial and error. These days they seem to have it down to a science. Take a female singer with the right “look”. A Nelly Furtado, Shakira or Lady Gaga or whoever. Give them a catchy hook to sing over and over. Put the right thumping back beat behind it. Maybe add some effects or catch phrases and Voila!! We have a hit!
I’m not so sure about that. How is it much different than what Motown, Stax, Phil Spector, etc., were doing back in the day, when they were churning out hit after hit?
One thing to keep in mind is that our musical “vocabulary” is constantly expanding. As we become exposed to new sounds and musical constructions, we learn to appreciate and enjoy them. Furthermore, as sounds and musical constructions age, they take on new dimensions as they gain nostalgic associations. This means the face of music is ever changing.
For example, take a modern electronic pop song and give it to someone from the 1950s. They are not going to be able to make sense of it- it’s going to sound like a bunch of garbage, much like we perceive Chinese opera to be random atonal screeches. It took time for us to learn to appreciate a pounding beat.
Furthermore, a lot of modern music gives nods to the past. Putting in a hint of Indian ragas will instantly conjure up feelings for the 1960s. Sampling will bring us back to the 80s. Now autotune has become some kind of self-referencing ironic thing. You need some kind of skill to use these associations and the moods they create effectively.
So I don’t think you could ever completely manufacture the cutting edge because the vocabulary is just changing too fast.
The way you test any other consumer product. With sales data, marketing focus groups and so on. My brother’s company spends a fortune trying to figure out what subtle background color will influence consumers to buy more of their toothpaste. The music industry has decades of market data from Billboard, MTV, VH1, CD and MP3 sales and so on.
Everything is data. Artistic pretentions aside, a song is just 4 minutes of noise. Those nises can be broken down into pitch, tone, beats per minute, and the rest of the individual components and evaluated to see which ones people respond to most favorably.
Well, Billboard charts would seem to disagree with you.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not debating the artistic merit or lyrical quality of any of these artists. However, I think becoming a hit artist is probably a lot more “American Idol” and less “miraculous discovery of some unknown genius” than most people think. For every Lady Gaga, there is an equally talented Stefani Gagamanotta singing in obscurity in some Bleeker St bar.
But, strangely, I would pay money if one or the other tried to cover the other.
I would pay money for Beastie Boys covering “Anywhere Is”, provided they rap it:
“I walk to the Horizon, and you know what?”
“What, Man?”
"There I find another. It all seems so Surprizin’ "
“And then I find that I know”
You go there and you are gone forever, I go there, and I will lose my way, We stay here we are gone together*.
Man, Anywhere is.
[*Ironically, for the Boys to nail this part, it would have to be slower than Enya does it. Almost speaking each word pointedly as they do]
I was gonna have Enya Cover a Beastie Boys song, but doesn’t quite work out. I would like to think there would be that ONE song that Enya could do perfectly.
Not even remotely close to reality. I hope that one day you have a chance to actually try and come up with a song that people will buy. Like most things in life, it is far, far harder to do than it may seem from the outside. Even if I gave you access to all the modern production tools and a good producer, you’d still struggle to cook up something worthwhile. It’s just not an easy thing to do.
Even something that may seem simple and formulaic, such as ‘Just Dance’, is the result of scores and scores of smart, intelligent decisions about what works and what doesn’t, put together by some very savvy, experienced and hard-working people. You may or may not like the result - that’s just down to personal taste and preference - but don’t make the mistake of thinking there is anything easy or simplisitic about it.
That’s OK, I got hopelessly lost reading your first post - ‘cause, like art, I don’t know nothin’ about music. But I know what I like. I had always heard that there was some ‘secret’ to music (musical heroin) that affected the human brain. Some kind of tempo or rhythm that would get you hooked…I guess after reading these posts that it isn’t true. Take “Ray of Light” by Madonna - gadz, I LOVED that song (still do). The same year, Cher came out with “Do You Believe in Life After Love”. By all standards, I SHOULD have loved that song, too, but it was like hydrochloric acid being poured in my ears. Avoided it like nuclear waste, I did. It had a catchy dance rhythm similar to many other favorite dance songs, but I hated it with a passion.
- ‘cause, like art, I don’t know nothin’ about music. But I know what I like. I had always heard that there was some ‘secret’ to music (musical heroin) that affected the human brain. Some kind of tempo or rhythm that would get you hooked…I guess after reading these posts that it isn’t true. Take “Ray of Light” by Madonna - gadz, I LOVED that song (still do). The same year, Cher came out with “Do You Believe in Life After Love”. By all standards, I SHOULD have loved that song, too, but it was like hydrochloric acid being poured in my ears. Avoided it like nuclear waste, I did. It had a catchy dance rhythm similar to many other favorite dance songs, but I hated it with a passion.