BackManufacturing the modern-day pop song
Anyone can make amazing and ethereal music from a seemingly infinite tech catalogue that gets better and better with every passing year
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Some years ago, a close friend of mine who happens to be a music director and I were listening to a song called Oh Ho Sanam by Himesh Reshammiya from the movie Dasavatharam, where Kamal Hassan played every role in the movie (except music director).
My friend, unlike most musicians, had a very broad taste in music. He is not the type that swears only by Ilayaraja or insists on smoking weed only to lossless FLAC versions of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon heard through high-impedance Beyerdynamic headphones. He is someone who enjoys pop music and eschews all forms of annoying elitism that generally plagues his kind.
But on hearing this particular song by Himesh, he looked at me with an uncharacteristically manic expression on his face and said that this was, in his considered opinion, the worst ever song in the history of music.
Now, why would a normally balanced, quiet, unassuming musician who enjoyed everything from Anu Malik to Aphex Twin declare that Oh Ho Sanam was even worse than, say, Doordarshan choruses from the 1980s?
If you have heard that song and are not a serious musician, you would probably tap your feet and go “It’s not really that bad, is it? It’s actually rather catchy" and I would agree, but then my friend wasn’t posting this opinion of his on Twitter or Facebook. He was very specifically sharing this with a fellow musician with the implicit understanding that I knew where he was coming from.
The rest of this column is going to be an attempt by me to share that understanding with you.
To do that, we must first go back, as we always should, to the beginning of the universe. It turns out that the Big Bang created the universe and with it, a hard-bound copy of Resnick & Halliday’s Fundamentals of Physics a few nanoseconds later. And our entire physical reality is describable by a few fundamental constants like the speed of light in vacuum, Planck’s constant and the gravitational constant. In simpler terms, if the values of these constants had been any different, we wouldn’t have existed to ponder about our existence in the first place.
By now, some of you might be wondering what Himesh Reshammiya has to do with these cosmological principles. I would counsel patience.
It turns out our understanding of music at all levels, from the casual listener to a New Yorker critic, is fundamentally predicated on some really basic physics. There are only 12 notes in music and a small number of harmonic principles that dictate how they work together and all of this is grounded in the simple physics of vibrating strings and their lengths and ratios.
The amazing outcome of this is the fact that music from practically every part of the world has the same set of notes! Human civilization went from the plaintive monophonic melodies of ancient Egypt to the goosebumps-inducing opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played by hundreds of instruments while working with just those 12 notes all the time.
But this tale has another element, one that began with a Belgian chap named Adolphe Sax, before it makes its way to Himesh eventually (again, patience). Sax was a precocious inventor of musical instruments and was among the first ones to apply serious engineering and industrial design (more than art and tradition) to the making of instruments.
Brass instruments, in a pre-amplified era, were the only ones you could hear in a noisy club and that explains why jazz, when it swung by at the turn of the century, almost exclusively used brass instruments, the most popular of which is named after its inventor, the saxophone.
While the jazz age was in full swing, another instrument started getting the attention of engineers—the guitar. Originally a soft-sounding instrument only used to serenade lovers lounging on balconies, it underwent a radical transformation in the hands of people like Adolph Rickenbacker (I have no idea why the history of musical instruments is infested with this many Adolphs), Clarence Leonidas Fender and Les Paul.
With advances in amplification, the world’s most iconic musical instrument was born—the electric guitar.
The electric guitar unleashed the rock ’n’ roll era, when white musicians heard black people sing the blues and started seeing dollar signs in front of their eyes. Forget the harmonic and percussive complexity of jazz, they said. All you need to make a hit song are four chords, and thus was born the modern-day pop song. The formula has survived till this day. Take a Lady Gaga song apart and you will find the same four chords repeated over and over again.
By the 1960s, more breakthroughs happened in the area of sound effects, where the basic sound of the instrument could be modulated using principles from a subject in electronics engineering that every student abhors with a passion: signal processing.
After several generations of engineers being reduced to tears by signal processing examinations in universities around the world, we finally heard what it could do on a stage when packaged into an effects pedal connected to a Fender Stratocaster guitar.
Jimi Hendrix, on the Woodstock stage in 1969, made sounds with the guitar that no one had heard before, and by the early 1970s, David Gilmour became the hallucinating soundtrack of an entire generation whose bodies were firmly fixed on terra firma while their minds were ice-skating on Saturnine moons.
Alan Parsons, the legendary sound engineer of the most iconic Pink Floyd albums, started doing things to music in the studio that were nearly impossible to replicate in a live performance. The sound engineer went on to become someone nearly as important as the artist.
The 1980s unleashed another disruptive technology—synthesizers. Using a technique called pulse code modulation, real instruments could be “emulated" on a keyboard. The early ones didn’t really sound like any real instrument, but had a character of their own, to the point where they became new instruments by themselves.
But one area where synthesizers really shined in the early days is percussion. Since they had small microprocessors, they could be programmed to play back recorded samples of drums, and unlike real-life drummers, they didn’t have drinking habits and death wishes by motorcycle accidents. That iconic opening beat you hear on Michael Jackson’s Beat It (1982) was not played by a drummer. It was synthesized.
By the mid-’90s, computers had become powerful enough to herald the era of digital audio workstations, all-in-one software packages that allowed you to play and record any instrument known to man, add effects to shape and modulate those sounds beyond recognition and churn out complex, layered music from your laptop at home, no studio required.
Now, we are in 2016. I want to give you an insider’s view of how popular music is made today and dispel any notion that there is even the remotest amount of art in this entire endeavour.
Say, you want to make a song about the institutional patriarchal control of the DJ console at nightclubs and a young woman’s bold feminist initiative to get the song of her choice to be played at a high volume (and high bass levels).
You first need to get the vocalist to sing the main hook—“DJ waley babu mere gaana chalaado" (Your highness the bureaucrat of disc jockey, perchance might it be your pleasure to play my song)—so you record her singing it many times over.
You listen to each sample and realize that sample 37 sounds slightly better than the rest because there were either breathing sounds or slight mispronunciations in the other versions. You take sample 37, copy-paste it three times, and then for the fourth time, you slice the audio at just the “gaana chalaado" part and then copy-paste it twice and you take this entire bit and repeat it once more. If you wanted to do this in the 1970s, it involved scissors and tape.
Now, you need a beat. You open your 345GB sample library and listen to every variation of every beat in every genre at every tempo and pick the one you think works for you. No drummers, no programming, nothing. Just walk over to the buffet table and pick your beat.
Then, for some reason, you think a factory siren would make an excellent addition to the second time the lady beseeches the DJ waley babu. You search in your sample library for “siren" and find 34,465 variants. You pick the London air-raid siren variation and slide it into your project. You copy-paste it to make it play thrice. And to spice up the beat, you are thinking, hmm, I need the sound of a champagne glass breaking.
Do you need to go find a glass and drop it in front of a microphone? No. Search for “champagne glass breaking" and your sample library will give you choices between Moet & Chandon and Dom Perignon.
Now that you have your intro, you need to record your chorus. Your vocalist does a decent job, but clearly, decent isn’t good enough, is it? You put her voice through this magical piece of software called Auto-Tune, which will analyse every pitch the vocalist sings and allow the sound engineer to make her sound unreally perfect.
But that’s not enough. When the chorus kicks in, you want her voice to play out of both left and right headphones with a stereophonic effect so that it feels like her voice envelops you. No problems. Pick the “stereo imaging" plug-in and choose the millisecond delay you want between the left and the right headphones, and that neat little engineering trick is enough to fool the listener’s ears into believing that Aastha Gill is circumambulating your head, filling your ears with her voice in every direction.
So far, it was all just beats and voice. Now, we need some guitars, and you would be thinking, aha, I need to go find a guitarist to play the three chords that make up the entire song. And you would be wrong. All you do is open your “software instrument" library and pick from 6,735 different guitar sounds and “play" the guitar on your keyboard. And if that wasn’t enough, you can add some sheen and sparkle to make the sounds pop in your head with a few clicks of the mouse.
So, after the chorus is done, you decide you want to repeat the DJ waley babu + siren opening refrain so that it serves as a perfect set-up for an imposing Haryanvi gentleman to come and rap. Now, rap vocals require slightly different kinds of processing. For starters, they need to be perfectly on the beat and that requires years and years of practice. Or we could just take anything he raps and use the “timing correction" plugin that allows you to finely edit every syllable being sung to make it sound metronomically accurate.
Once you are done with the song, it’s shipped to someone known as a mixing and mastering engineer, who does a lot more magic with the full track before the public gets to hear it. A software plug-in called “multiband compression" allows the engineer to selectively boost and attenuate ranges of frequencies in the track to do things like “make the bass rumble enough to dislocate the listener’s duodenum" or “add reverb to make the track sound like it was recorded in the Notre-Dame cathedral" and so on.
The modern-day pop song is a product of some insanely sophisticated engineering. The actual artist does little to nothing really. With software, you can recreate entire orchestras without ever having seen a single violin or cello in your life. You can play church organs in your bedroom and correct the pitch of the most toneless voices on the planet.
Anyone can make amazing, ethereal and uplifting music from this seemingly infinite catalogue of music technology that gets better and better with every passing year.
And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, my music director friend looked at me knowingly and said Oh Ho Sanam by Himesh Reshammiya is the worst song in the history of music.
Of all the beat samples he could have picked up, he picks something that sounds like demo music on a kid’s Casio keyboard.
Of all the brilliantly lush guitar sounds he could have picked, he picks something that sounds worse than the sounds some cars make when in reverse gear.
With the amount of sophisticated technology available today, that song, to a music maker’s ears, objectively sucks.
Krish Ashok is an IT consultant, amateur musician, blogger and perpetrator of Internet memes.
Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com
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