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September 21, 2006 9:35 AM   Subscribe

What makes music from a time period so immediately recognizeable as from that period?

How can I, someone with zero musical training and very very little musical knowledge, hear a song for the first time and know that it's from the late 60s/early 70s or from the mid-90s, etc? What is it that I hear and recognize in music, and how can I place it pretty accurately in time, even if it's a time that I wasn't alive for, or a genre that I didn't listen to?

Also: how can current pop music simultaneously sound very 1980s but also very 2000s?
posted by arcticwoman to Media & Arts (15 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think a lot of it has to do with what musical instruments are in vogue/available at a given time. Think of electric guitar, synthesizer, or hammond organs, for example. Or to go back further, think of the harpsichord, which definitely evokes a certain time period.
posted by TedW at 9:55 AM on September 21, 2006


I think a lot has to do with the instruments used and the technology they used to record the music. That's why bands that want to have some sort of retro sound (say, the Black Crowes) go and buy instruments and amps from that time and then they try to play the music as it used to be played.

As for the music that sounds very 80s yet very 2000s, I think what happens with a lot of electroclash bands, for instance, is that they go and buy beatboxes from the 80s, and use them indistinctively with more modern equipment. Also, they do not try to play the music as it used to be played, but rather incorporate more modern into it, hence the oldey-but-modern sound.
posted by micayetoca at 10:00 AM on September 21, 2006


I think that there are two general reasons for how music becomes closely associated with a particular time period: factors internal to the music itself, and factors external to the music that become associated with it.

"Internal" factors include:

- Period-specific trends regarding melody, harmony, rhythm, and arrangement. Example: fewer popular songs now are recorded in 3/4 time than in previous eras when waltzes were more popular.

- Recording techniques and technology. Example: recorded big band music typically has a tinny-to-nonexistent bottom end, so its easily distinguishable from modern recorded music with prominent bass and drums.

- Instrumentation. Examples: no electric guitars in the 20s; early synths and roland drum machines that were all the rage in the 80s (and this answers your second question - nothing makes modern music sound both contemprary and 80s-esque like an TR808 drum line or squelchy TR303 synth bass).

"External" factors are more ineffable. In some cases, a particular "sound" becomes associated with a particular era by its frequent inclusion in other popular culture (movies, TV, etc) - thus the BeeGees' inclusion in Saturday Night Fever solidified that particular disco sound as emblematic of the 70s; the soundtrack of John Hughes movies solidifed the "80s sound" and so forth. I suspect that you (and most of us) have a catalog of such emblematic songs burned into our skulls as popular culture references, and when we hear a new one we compare them to this catalog and make a guess at what era it belongs to. Its kind of like how harp music has become emblematic of dream sequences in movies/TV - what you recognize as "80s music" is as much a product of pop culture references to it, as it is something inherent in the music itself.
posted by googly at 10:01 AM on September 21, 2006 [2 favorites]


Please bear with me, while I try to (over-)analyze this as Distinctions in Time.

Rhythm: cultural heritage can be identified using a single note repeatedly. Time standardized tempos to heart-rate, breathing, stepping, etc. Unusual tempos and rhythms are uniquely identifiable.

Scale: the basic frequencies and relations among them. Scales used in ancient Greece are seldom used anymore.

Once the scale became more standardized, chords provided identity. For example, dissonance is mostly a property of modern music. Most songs use a very limited chord set, so unusual chords are identifiable.

Then there is progression in time, of notes (in melody), of chords, and of structural sections. Think of how we can often tell which song we're hearing from just the first few notes - in some cases, the first note.

When an artist likes something they hear, and practise and use it themselves, it becomes embedded in their own work. Once many people had heard Robert Plant's timbre and phrasing, and started using it locally, it took on an iconic, genre-defining quality of its own.

Simultaneously 1980's and also 2000 - I think this comes from youth rediscovering the great. The other day I heard something by Gnarls Barkley that could've come from Stax records. But it also had rap rumbling around underneath, that someone from the 1960's would not have been able to recognize.
posted by dragonsi55 at 10:32 AM on September 21, 2006


I asked this to my sound engineer boyfriend a few years ago. Specifically, why the drums in all mid-eighties songs (particularly power ballads) sound the same. You know what I'm talking about...like Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight." He said it was just better microphones and how everyone was miking drums back then.
posted by lunalaguna at 11:27 AM on September 21, 2006


lunalaguna: You're probably thinking of gated reverb on drums, which was all the rage for a while in the 80s, until everyone got sick of it.
posted by xil at 12:18 PM on September 21, 2006


I would say that for modern popular recorded music the biggest factor that sets it in a particular time is the drum sounds. It's how they were mic'd (close mic'd, ambient etc), where they were recorded (ie what type of room), and how they were processed. That Phil Collins big drum sound that was so popular in the Eighties was a combination of dynamic compression and expansion with lots of reverb for example. (On preview, what xil said)
posted by TwoWordReview at 12:30 PM on September 21, 2006


A lot of the similarity is probably driven by how record companies market their product-- once somebody has a hit with a particular sound there is a lot of pressure to reproduce that success. Labels then sign and promote bands that are similar, and a lot of bands adjust their sounds to try and provide what the labels are looking for at the moment.

Record companies don't usually promote the new and different until it has developed a following on its own. And then the cycle starts again...
posted by InfidelZombie at 1:19 PM on September 21, 2006


Pretty much what googly said.

Ask yourself this question: what makes anything from any time period recognizable as from that time period? I'd put it simply as fashion. Fashion changes, and those changes are driven by many factors: technology, current events, reactions to the preceding fashions, etc.

As for music in particular, I'm not sure exactly what you expect to hear. How can you tell hip-hop from country, or blues from salsa? Music from the 40s sounds different from music from the 80s because it is different. It was written for different instruments, written in a different musical style, and recorded and produced with different technology.

Are you looking for more specific examples of period-specific musical ideas? The gated-reverb on the snare drum is a common one. The classic 1950s pop chord progression is I vi IV V; i.e. C Am F G in the key of C. Play it in 12/8 time, one chord to a bar, and you're set. Stereo mixing was handled very differently when stereo was new (in the 60s). Recordings have been steadily getting louder since CDs first hit the scene.
posted by ludwig_van at 2:52 PM on September 21, 2006


Sorry, that should've been:

Recordings have been steadily getting louder since CDs first hit the scene.
posted by ludwig_van at 2:53 PM on September 21, 2006


Some of it isn't.
posted by flabdablet at 5:50 PM on September 21, 2006


It's not all about the technology. It can provide clues, but I think you get most of the information from other sources. Listen to this midi. You know that's an old song, and you didn't work it out by hearing lyrics or by recognizing instruments.

It's chord progressions and harmonies. Different times have different styles. This is why, when you listen to Britney Spears' "Lucky," you go "omgfifties," even though she isn't using the appropriate instruments, mics, producing techniques, or anything else.
posted by booksandlibretti at 8:34 PM on September 21, 2006


Agincourt song, huh? That English Traditional guy totally ripped me off.
posted by ludwig_van at 9:12 PM on September 21, 2006


The real bitch is the way he stole the march on you by only a couple hundred years.
posted by booksandlibretti at 10:15 PM on September 21, 2006


"He said it was just better microphones and how everyone was miking drums back then." - posted by lunalaguna at 11:27 AM PST on September 21

strangely, that's probably the worst reference possible for your boyfriend's (otherwise true) claim, since the drum recording on "In the Air Tonight" was the product of a happy accident.
posted by SeƱor Pantalones at 1:19 AM on September 22, 2006


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