The dehumanization of pop music has been a growing trend over the years, dare I say decades, but we have come to a point where taste and quality have entirely vanished from the tracks being propped up as "trendy" today. What is designated as popular music can only be solod with a massive marketing and promotion machine attached, creating tremendous effort to promote something that is dead, lifeless and obscene to a listener that wants depth and genuineness in music. Until everyone is so used to trash that they think they really want it.
Music tastes differ and they change but wow, our recent travels through Albania have really amped the sensationquite up a notch. Autotune is human voices is literally everywhere. Any small shop, restaurant, beach bar and pizzeria will play these same tracks. Tracks I had not heard before but that you just can't escape when you're out on holiday near places where someone has made some shady deals to promote the hell out of contemporary tracks of garbage and filth ;) ahahaha, it's true. It's a nuisance and a spiritual attack on anyone passing in hearing range.
But in that autotune madness I see ever finer details that hardly surprise me but that have become quite audaciously obvious today. We are no longer "just" slaughtering human voices and timbres, natural oscillations of the vocal cords and melodies, we are literally dehumanizing them to perfect steady pitch that sound like an algorithm - on purpose. It makes an already dull and shallow track even more superficial and annoying: The hook will drill itself into your brain like any good old natural chorus would have, but now you are having that razor flat pitch sensation in your mind all day when they repeat and repeat these same 20 tracks endlessly. It's quite disconcerting to have your van parked next to a beach bar that plays these tracks about 6 times a day without hesitation. Poor staff who have to work there but man even parking there drove me borderline insane.
Anyway, what I found even more amazing than the perfect robot pitch doctoring of human voices is that we have now come to a point where producing choices are made that have been labeled terrible sound engineering mere years back. Things like pitching a female voice down an octave or a male voice up half an octave just sounds terrible to the ears, probably because our brains have listened to so many people and voices over the course of our lifetime that we can "intuit" if someone is male or female. Males and females do not sound the same, their character of voice and pronunciation is vastly different.
But there is a glitch in the brain when you hear the character of a female voice in the pitch range of bassy male. It's just such a clusterfuck of sensations that can't be healthy for kids. No more healthy than having adult faces buried beneath a face mask hiding all emotions and facial expressions.
It's a trend that alienates and that separates. That artificially creates dissonance and emotional static in the subconscious.
All these natural nuances rooted in the natural world are simply swept away on purpose in what is called "pop" music today. It's such an attack on humanity it's hard to overestimate its impact in the long run.
Where producers used to enlist a man to sing the lower parts to complement the woman's higher phrases everything is now sung by the same individual and radically pitched down without mercy. It sounds wrong because it is wrong - there is nothing natural about it and you can even hear glitchy artifacts in those drastic pitch shifts, something that used to cost you your career as a promising audio engineer. Today though, that is all trendy and peachy. Someone - whoever it is - wants it out there. Count on it.
The neutralizing of any and all differences between man and woman in music.
If you think it is far fetched just listen to "popular" music of today and you will find it anywhere. Or wait a few years and find no single remainder of the once human qualities that made music so enjoyable to human ears.
Rant over ;)
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I hear what you're preaching! I most enjoy a beautiful voice that is unencumbered by technologically changing it. I love to hear notes that can be held like a violin hitting the right, long, emotional note. I don't like the voice gyrations and gymnastics on songs of emotion that should be pure and unadulterated. Thanks for the rant!
thanks for reading man, I fully agree.
All this new obsession will surely spark a counter trend if it hasn't already. Wouldn't be surprised if underground pop music makes a comeback. The purists, so to speak
They also sound the same because they are all trannies...
high probability. doubling down with technology regardless ahahaha