> From: GUEST,Blandiver
>
> Never once have I made any such accusations; neither would I dismiss anyone as a 'geek' or anything else.

That was just an aside about people in general. The issue here is that, in the post to which I took exception, you made a logically and scientifically incorrect statement, in fact a wildly incorrect statement which was the exact opposite of the truth!

> It is not pseudo anything - try reading as if you had any sort of wit or intelligence at all, much less imagination and you'd see it makes perfect sense.

Well I went to a top English school, have a first class honours degree, and also have written a few songs and poems, which I think covers all those points, and to me, and I suspect to most other people, it's just meaningless mumbo jumbo.

> It's what this conversation is about though

Not as I've been reading it. I've been reading it as "Why people don't go to Folk Clubs".

> The same can be said of any musical genre. All musical idioms sound the same when you don't understand them.

While there are elements of some musical genres that tend to sound the same - to the extent that they become clichéd like, for example, the wailing steel guitar favoured by some country artists or the artificial vocal angst favoured by some soul singers - you could never just apply that to the whole of one genre. In opera, Bizet's Carmen doesn't sound anything like Verdi's "Aida", which in turn doesn't sound anything like Wagner's "The Ring Cycle". In turn of the century classical, Rachmaninov sounds very different from Debussy who sounds very different from Sibelius. In jazz, Miles Davis sounds completely different from Sidney Bechet, who sounds different again from Charles Parker. In country, Shania Twain, even her first least 'pop' CD, sounds very different from Johnny Cash, who sounds very different from his daughter Rosanne Cash.

However, that is all irrelevant here. Understanding doesn't enter into it. What the scientists did was MEASURE popular music to determine its variability, and showed that it is in fact becoming less variable.