About this blog

This is my secondary, extremely-seldomly updated blog about music.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

The SCHOBS Scale

Today our worship pastor preached a fantastic sermon on worship and music and such. Once the link is up I highly recommend listening if you missed it. Anyway, it got me thinking about music; evaluating the lyrical content for truth. Also on the musical style, which, he was sure to emphasize, doesn't matter in worship music. Uh...I'm going to skip a few steps here and say that this led to me coming up with a scale for quickly, fairly completely describe the general style of a song, album, or artist. With my brilliant talent for coming up with acronyms, I call it the SCHOBS scale, and it looks like this:



I tried to find attributes that add up to provide a general, complete picture of musical style. I also tried to ensure that they were independent, i.e. none are correlated or interrelated.

Size: How "big" or bombastic does a song feel? Is it sparse and intimate or booming and epic? Symphonic elements, choirs (particularly chanting in other languages), lots of instruments, and reverb effects increase this score.
Complexity: In a nutshell, how intellectually challenging/stimulating/progressive a song is. Does it stay well within the mainstream songwriting conventions of its genre, or does it buck trends or have an intricate, well-thought-out structure?
Heaviness: In essence, how rough, heavy, or distorted a song is. In rock music, soft acoustic or piano rock falls on one of the end of the spectrum, extreme death metal/grindcore on the other. I'm not sure if this transfers to all non-rock genres.
Organicity: How "natural" or earthy does the song sound? Simplistic mixing techniques, acoustic/folk instrumentation, and unaltered singing increase this score, electronic effects, keyboards, or altered vocals decrease it.
Beauty: This one is pretty self-explanatory. Mainstream songs usually have plenty of this, but they don't have a monopoly on it.
Speed: Also self-explanatory. Is it a crawling ballad or a furious speed metal song with double-bass sixteenth notes?

Just to emphasize, none of these attributes are "good" or "bad", they are only descriptive. There are songs I highly enjoy that fall all over the map in all of them. I've realized most of my reviews simply describe the musical content of the songs; I think this scale will help save me some repetitive descriptive words and focus on why I really enjoy the music I listen to.

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