Show me some melody in modern electronic music.

[ghettosynth]

So I find the comment about Daft Punk above quite interesting, particularly considering their history. I'm sure by now that everyone's heard this:



Now, I won't say that this knocks my socks off, it's the sooper smoov side of Daft Punk that I can take or leave. I'm curious what those of you who are praising their "story skills" think though?

Now, as others have pointed out, this is really reminiscent of early seventies disco, both in flavor and tempo. I really like stuff from that era, and I like to remix it for "personal use." I'm currently working on this track:



Now, what I do like about Get Lucky is that it's a groove flavored record. Much like the recent hit by Maroon Five and Christina Aguilera, moves like Jagger.



But, like I said above, this style isn't the Daft Punk that knocks my socks off, nope, that's a slightly different style that didn't quite make it on the radio, at least not in your town. Well, maybe this did, but I doubt it. Are you getting tomatoes from the awesome punchy samples?



This didn't. I used to play the hell out of this. Is this telling the same story as that Pollak a few posts ago? Dont' turn it off, it takes a LONG ASS TIME for this one to get to the punchline.



Thomas Bangalter, half of Daft Punk, killed dance floors in the late 90s with these.





What's the story here? Is this the Daft Punk that you like?

[bermudagold]

to everybody postin the tunes...respect
appreciate the journey.

and as for shabba and buju....homophobia is extremely prevalent in most of the third world and most of the african diaspora. The origins of the issue and the environment that creates it is very complex however, so just as I wouldn't condone violent homophobia, I wouldn't write them off as people that easy....looking through an oversimplified western lens.

@ghettosynth...interesting idea....that danceability is tied to tempo....not sure I can buy that. Even posted in this thread already, there is a lot of music made with synths and drum machines with solid grooves at slower tempos that millions of people all over the world love to dance to. So before we can even examine the theories on melody, I'm still confused on how are we defining EDM and how are we defining dancing. When I hear you talk of the chill room and such, I get the feeling you're using a pretty narrow definition of both.....which may be the dominant understanding overall with most people so I got no problem with it...just interesting to me....the notion of EDM and dancing being so scene specific.


















still bubblin....

[ghettosynth]

@ghettosynth...interesting idea....that danceability is tied to tempo....not sure I can buy that. Even posted in this thread already, there is a lot of music made with synths and drum machines with solid grooves at slower tempos that millions of people all over the world love to dance to.

No doubt. It really does depend on what we're talking about in terms of dancing and motivation for dancing. I really can't speak to this from anything other than a euro-centric point of view.

So before we can even examine the theories on melody, I'm still confused on how are we defining EDM and how are we defining dancing. When I hear you talk of the chill room and such, I get the feeling you're using a pretty narrow definition of both.....which may be the dominant understanding overall with most people so I got no problem with it...just interesting to me....the notion of EDM and dancing being so scene specific.

I can really only speak to what I've observed in club and rave culture over the years and as a musician in cover bands.

So first, the question that was posed in this thread was with respect to EDM and I assumed, based on the examples and the posters, that we were largely talking about the USA/UK or the USA/UK influenced markets.

So, my assertion is framed, in part by why people dance, then also, how they dance. There is strong evidence for preferred tempos in dance music. It's essentially trivial to think about this, we are physical objects, when moving, we are oscillators, we have resonance.

http://www.ipem.ugent.be/dirkmoelants/p ... idered.pdf

The central issue in this paper was a reconsideration of the
location of natural or preferred tempo. Until now it was
generally located around 600 ms (100 bpm), but we showed that
a period slightly below 500 ms is probably more realistic. As
characteristic period we chose 480 ms (125 bpm), but since this
is just an average 500 ms could be used for convenience. This
tempo was found in both the preferred rate of repeated motor
actions and in the peak in the distribution of tempi as perceived
in various sets of musical data

So, how we dance, i.e. what parts of our body we move and how we move them, will have some impact on the range of tempos that we can, or perhaps prefer to, dance to.

In junior high school, Americans love very slow tempo songs that facilitate slowly turning in circles while touching each other's hips. This is called dancing, but really, it's just sex-lite. So much of what happens in american clubs is also sex-lite and I'm really dismissing that as not interesting from an EDM culture point of view. Further it is not driven by any optimization of physical motion, rather, it's driven by an optimization of hormonal pleasure.

So, in a sense, we have to separate these motivations. People will endure significant discomfort if they are motivated by sex so we can't view those people as "optimizing" movement for its own sake. Dancehall culture is interesting from this point of view because it appears, to an outsider, to be overtly and weirdly motivated by both, but, like hiphop culture in the U.S., to the extent that there is any "collective conscious", it's some weird orgy of peacocks. This is not house music dance culture where dancing takes the front seat.

You can observe a range of dance behaviors when people are participating in EDM culture. As the tempo slows, full body motion that includes leg movement slows dramatically and the leg movement eventually stops. This makes sense, they are our largest appendage, they are heavy, when we are out of resonance, it takes too much "power" to move them. As the tempo speeds up past our resonance, again, let movement, per se, stops, but not before there is some transition through a jumping phase, see HHC. Again, it takes too much power to move our legs at that tempo, but, higher tempos induce these "high energy" states, where as slower tempos convey a more "relaxed" state. At some point, however, the tempo becomes too fast and people just nod their heads.

Of course there are exceptions at all extremes. Some people have higher resonance points owing to different mass, strength, and shape, some lower. Skill developed through practice is also a factor.

So, with respect to dubstep and jungle, both have tempos that lie outside of the preferred range and when either doubled or halved, are at the extreme of the preferred range in the other direction.

When people don't actually move their body or don't move their body with the music, e.g. the dubstep moshpit we saw earlier, the tempo is less important. When people move their body a lot and over a long period of time, it becomes dramatically more important, on average. In my opinion, the fact that house fluctuates around what is essentially the optimum range for human "resonance" is more than coincidence.

Wikipedia gives a reasonable starting definition of EDM.

Electronic dance music (sometimes referred to as EDM, club music, or simply as dance music) is a set of percussive electronic music genres produced primarily for environments centered in dance-based entertainment, such as nightclub settings. The music is largely created for use by disc jockeys and is produced with the intention of it being heard in the context of a continuous DJ set; wherein the DJ progresses from one record to the next via a synchronized segue or "mix".

That said, in the U.S. we're largely talking about styles derived from house and techno with some influence from breakbeat culture. Most hip hop musicians don't use the phrase, to them, hiphop is hiphop, not EDM. So, I would say that to the average consumer, EDM includes house and dubstep, but not hiphop or dancehall. A broader definition might include all of the above.

YMMV.

[Sendy]

In most of the House tracks I do I have at least one spot where it goes off-bar, or at least off-measure, and it just pisses DJs off completely.

The real warfare starts when you start adding tiny tempo fluctuations to what's an otherwise steady beat

[ZenPunkHippy]

[bermudagold]

@ghettosynth
All i can say is WOW...you really broke that down...great food for thought.
its funny...a lot of skanking is done double time to the beat, so even though the music tempo might be less than the ideal 125 bpm in that study, the physiological reaction can be quite similar,..progressive enchantment and disengagement from surroundings, and euphoric release. I get the context of EDM now though and where you comin from.

thanks man...i hadn't heard that one in forever. I will never forget my boy came back home from a training course in england and he brought that very tune on vinyl. He tried to explain the whole rave scene we had never heard of and stories of people rubbing vicks up they nose...lol...we remember relating to the dubplate nature of it...how they took walking in memphis and made a promotional out of it by changing the words. Pretty much what all the artists home would do with hit songs of the week/month to win sound clashes...now I know he brought back some choice records!

Always intriguing experiencing new sounds and scenes. I saw these guys live in unguja...nothin but drums, vocals and a casio....makin due with what they got. Same progressions, buildups, tension and release....and lots of people going to that special place becoming one with the music. European promoters have started recording them and are actually marketing this music coined as the "trance music of africa"

[A.M. Gold]

As far as "optimized body movement", this looks fairly optimized to me. Seems like the participants think so, at least (And barely any kick drum to be heard, though the groove is obvious and repetitive):

[vurt]

dub stylee loungecore

[ghettosynth]

As far as "optimized body movement", this looks fairly optimized to me. Seems like the participants think so, at least (And barely any kick drum to be heard, though the groove is obvious and repetitive):

And so science agrees with you as I clock that at about 122BPM on a quick tap tempo. Funny that, it's, IMNSHO, the perfect long night/day house tempo. I can take 127 to 130 for shorter periods of time but by 4am I like it to settle into the groove at 123BPM or so.

The optimal tempo theory has nothing to do with the content, only the tempo. In fact, these ideas are far older than "house music." It is distinctly different from the neurological evidence for our ability to synchronize and how it relates to stiffness of the metronomic signal, and both are different from the relationship between repetitive mantras and their ability to induce certain kinds of brain patterns. These ideas taken together help to potentially explain why dance music has evolved the way that it has in the face of technology.

BTW: Awesome track, nice guitar bits. That's a great target for a house remix. As is, it could certainly be mixed into an early morning or early afternoon set with chill house but it's not at all where dance music is today. You can't go back in time and say, "see, this was great to dance to then" and expect that contemporary audiences will agree. In fact, the stuff that I like is FAR too chill already for the current "mainroom" vibe.

If you like that sort of thing though, I buy house remixes of tracks like that all the time. I'm guessing that there's a steady but not very large consistent demand. I have no idea how productive one needs to be to earn a living or how difficult it is to break into the scene though.

Here, you might like this, it's groovy and a little preachy!

http://www.beatport.com/search?query=the+basics

[A.M. Gold]

Yea, my bad, I didn't realize you were only talking about tempo. I'm still litigating whether all-dominating 4 on the floor kicks are necessary for people to want to dance instinctively.

[jancivil]

all that lingo seems to do for me is indicate that some people have a narrow window of opportunity to do something pretty natural, as if it didn't come too naturally. Gotta have all four on that floor! within a range of a few BPM even.

there's a distinction made that that Soul Train thing is some older way to be that people today *disagree* with.

check out that footwork between 2:06-2:15. that's dancing, and he's dancing to the most fancy stuff he finds in that groove.

[A.M. Gold]

Yea, that sort of sums up my attitude as well. I'm dragging the old, smelly horse carcass out again and I'm guessing this thread has moved on from this specific point, but I'm just not going to buy it that somehow it was finally settled, or discovered, or whatever term you want to use, that people really want, deep down inside, to dance to intensely simplistic rhythmic sound and nothing else (or at least that everything else cramps their strong basic instincts for dance). Again, I don't buy it and I probably never will.

It's clear a lot of people have responded to that kind of sound, but we will never know how those same people might have responded if the spirit of Curtis Mayfield or Maurice White had somehow taken over and dominated the dance clubs in the 90's as opposed to the forces that did. We are just speculating regardless of which position we take on this issue, since the kind of complex rhythm section work that dominated danceable funk, soul, and by extension disco, hasn't really reintroduced itself strongly, even in the cases of more melodic vocal dance music.

But, all that said, I should probably add that the following is also an example of music that makes me want to dance (try to ignore the tempo fluctuations):

[ZenPunkHippy]

It's clear a lot of people have responded to that kind of sound, but we will never know how those same people might have responded if the spirit of Curtis Mayfield or Maurice White had somehow taken over and dominated the dance clubs in the 90's as opposed to the forces that did.

Sure we do.

If you go to any major music festival you will find multiple dance floors playing a range of music including house, trance, techno, breaks, funk, soul, classics, ambient and bug-out electronica.

Ignoring that people like me who go to trance festivals want to dance to trance music, if these classics inspired people to dance for several days then DJ culture would have allowed those styles to filter to the top, but that's not what we see on the main dance floor. So there must be something about the four-to-the-floor beat that works, otherwise DJ culture would have produced a different result - it's not like people are forced to choose at gun point

So through this process of natural selection (popular DJs or producers rise to the top) the classics have been relegated (for want of a less disparaging term ) to the chill out tent or novelty bar playing funky disco etc. for people who want to have a fun time away from the main dance floor.

All styles work, but one is generally preferred over the other for extended periods dancing and there is a good reason for that: it's a primal urge, but you won't get that until you give it a proper go.

Peace,
Andy.

* fixed glaringly obvious grammatical error

[A.M. Gold]

You've been to festivals that play Curtis Mayfield, trance, and Stevie Ray Vaughan?

[ZenPunkHippy]

You've been to festivals that play Curtis Mayfield, trance, and Stevie Ray Vaughan?

Well, yes, but I guess that doesn't conform to the generally accepted opinion of dumb ass kids listening to even dumber 8 bar loops repeated forever

Less Stevie Ray Vaughn (not exactly dance music!) but yes to the funky stuff (disco, Motown, etc). If the event is big enough (10K+ people) there will be a live music stage too, but again concentrating on the fun / funky / chilled groovy side.

It's the type of music is typically played on the smaller stages because the audience is smaller. It's a lot of fun, but IMO not not optimal for 10 - 20 hours of dancing.

The type of events I'm talking are not your average stadium EDM event, I'm not interested in that side of dance music at all - that's just crass money driven commercial BS, so if you want to appeal to that market, probably best to speak to someone else

In the US I think event organisers like Symbiosis would be putting on the type of events I'd attend (they were out here recently to help organise an Eclipse festival).

Peace,
Andy.