> From: GUEST,Blandiver
>
> > you could never just apply that to the whole of one genre.

> A musical genre is defined by its specialised idioms which are always going to sound the same to people who don't understand them

That is an absolutist assertion stated as though it were fact, and, unsurprisingly, it's wrong. When we look at the way genres are used in the real world, a musical genre is simply what the generality of the public think it is when they use it as a classification, nothing more, nothing less.

> as do languages to those who don't actually speak them.

I don't speak the majority of the world's languages, but nearly all that I have heard spoken without any understanding on my part, to me sounded noticeably different from one another.

> It's all very well saying Miles Davis sounds different to Sidney Bechet, but the casual listener won't even know who Miles Davis is, much less Sidney Bechet,

They don't need to. If they hear both in succession they will realise immediately that they are completely different despite being in the same genre.

> so imagine trying to explain that those who love On the Corner will also love Kind of Blue.

Or quite possibly not.

> All the casual listener will hear is 'JAZZ'

No, the *casual* listener won't even bother with genres, but simply like or dislike. If the former, they then may start to think along the lines of: "I wonder what this is? It seems to be some sort of Jazz, I must look out for the credit at the end of the number!"

> only the devotee gets, or cares about, the detail wherein dwells, of course, the very devil himself.

I think devotees can probably speak for themselves, and in many cases would probably answer differently from what either of us would expect.

> We could extend this to the various idioms and traditions currently known as POP MUSIC and (if we ever could be bothered) subject them to the necessary meta-analysis that would be sure to establish (once and for all) that they don't really sound the same either

As explained in the other thread, it's been done, and the results were opposite to what you claim here.

> Whatever scientists say up there in their ivory tower

THAT'S EXACTLY THE SORT OF DENIGRATION OF SCIENCE THAT I REFERRED TO ABOVE! While occasionally there is bad science, even rare scientific fraud, apart from this relatively small number of aberrations science increases our understanding of the world. Technology resulting from scientific progress made the man-made world most of us in developed nations inhabit today, get used to it. You may not like what science tells us about ourselves, but you'll have to do better than unsubstantiated assertions stated as though fact if you want to refute a given piece of scientific research.

> to the millions of people out there listening, loving, creating, mixing, remixing, sampling and celebrating the Culture of Pop Music, it is (most demonstrably and empirically) a living thing of infinitely diverse beauty and wonderment.

Another statement which is provably bollocks.

Firstly, human pitch sensitivity is limted to at best about 25Hz to about 25KHz and our ability to discriminate pitch accurately seems to be concentrated at the centre of that range. There are similar contraints with loudness and ability to discriminate two aural events temporally. These are fundamental limitations incompatible with the word 'infinitely'.

Further, as long ago as the Ancient Greeks, Pythagoras worked out that notes which sound pleasant together have a simple mathematical relationship to each other. Notes not having this simple relationship do not sound pleasant together. (We now know that the simple relationship is in frequency aka pitch.) This particularly limits the use of discordant notes.

Probably from the regular use of concordant notes and the need to tune instruments such as lyres able to sound more than one note at a time, natural scales evolved. When it became desirable to introduce more variety, modes using the notes of natural scales differently evolved. To acheived greater variation still, the compromise of the western tempered scale was invented, whereby some of the notes of a natural scale were made slightly discordant so that one could now base music on any note of the scale, without any one such 'key' sounding more discordant than another. Both natural and tempered scales further limit the notes available to be played.

Whether built to play a natural scale - tin whistle, melodeon - or a tempered scale - concert flute, accordion - with the major exceptions of guitars (string bending or fretless), viols, and brass, instruments are made to play notes from these scales, and cannot play others, which is a further limitation. Further, all instruments have a limited range.

So the constraints of our physiology, the scales and instruments that we use, all introduce limitations that do not allow infinite variation in music, even supposing the people making pop music were pushing these limits, which it has been shown that they are not, presumably because they are constrained further by the need to achieve commercial success.

> Same goes for the 'scientific' 1954 Definition - which has feck all to do with the songs, much less the lives & experience of the people who made and sang them.

See below.

> I wonder, is science becoming the new fundamentalism? For sure its advocates are sounding suspiciously absolutist in their joyless pronouncements of late, daddy-o. At least they are on this thread, where a bit of fun ... is taken by our resident 1954-Bore as further evidence of The Sesquipedalian Heresy.

No, if anything the new fundamentalism is denigrating science, believing, against all logic, that everything in life either can be answered by religion, or is just a matter of personal opinion, however uneducated and ignorant the person holding that opinion. Witness what has happened in this thread. You reply to one or two people about something that happened in the 60s, during the course of which you make a provably inane statement, whereupon I come in quoting science to put you right. In reply you make another untrue statement, whereupon I point to another thread which refers to a scientific paper which disproves your assertion. The 60s people have never mentioned science, and I've never mentioned the 60s, yet here you are lumping us together, blaming science for what you see as didactorialism of the 60s. Note just how eager you are to slag off science for something it didn't claim, and how unwilling you are to accept its statements of a truth that you don't happen to like and seem to find uncomfortable because it contradicts your previously held views. Whether you like scientific results or not is irrelevant to their truth. If you want to attack science you'll have to read and try and understand the papers, and find a rational scientific flaw in the research. Unsubstantiated contrary assertions stated as though they were fact won't do.

I have no interest in debating 60s didactorialism, and I don't suppose many others have either - something that happened in one, albeit influential, folk club 50 years ago has little or no influence on whether people go to folk clubs today. The determining factor is many times more likely to be the standard of entertainment on offer in modern clubs.