Sunday, February 10, 2013
REM's "Losing My Religion" shifted into a major scale
Boing Boing: Michael sez, "Someone has gone to the trouble (I don't know how but would suspect using Melodyne DNA or somesuch) of processing REM's minor-scale downer hit 'Losing My Religion' so that all the minor notes are now major. When I followed the link I thought it'd be a cover, but no, it's the original, processed. It's uncanny - the song is just as familiar as always but the impact is utterly different. Kind of like finding a colour print of a film you'd only known in black and white, or seeing Garfield minus Garfield for the first time. I like it."
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7 comments:
So I listen to this version of the song right after listening to the original. It's amazing what changing the nots from major to minor can do. The song sounds so much more hopeful in a major key. That aside, I'm still in shock that our technology had evolved to the point were we have software that can alter notes in a song to change every major chord to a minor one. Even though some of the notes were synthetic the song still had a real quality to it. As thought the band had just decided to make another recording with all the noted changed, not that the original song was run through a music processing system. Its fascinating.
You know, I can't decide if I like this or not. It's absolutely an interesting experiment - placing a different perspective on the song, and even changing the mood and interpretation of the song. It's exactly what you would expect, but it's still very disorientating if you know the original.
I wouldn't trade it for the original.
So I'm kind of in love with this version. I'm a huge fan of this song and I listen to the original all the time, but this is completely different. It's strange, raising the notes make it a bigger song. It seems to have more weight and it somehow seems sadder. I wonder what would happen if this version was layered with the original. I agree with Ariel though, I'd never trade the original.
It's definitely different. I can't say which one is better mainly because it feels like the song is achieving something entirely different now. In the original, the minor chords set a moody and dark atmosphere full of self-reflection and doubt, and it masters this wonderfully. This new version, however, has major chords which lift up the entire song and present the listener with a warmer, more inviting, and hopeful song. Both approaches are successful in their outcomes, but between those two results their lies so much disparity that it becomes impossible to compare and rate them against each other.
I actually saw this posted on reddit a few weeks ago with the title "recovering my religion," and I thought the song changed meaning in that exact way. Instead of being a dark and hopeless ballad, it was uplifting and hopeful. I've since been exploring other songs shifted into their relative Major/minor keys, and it is SO interesting to hear how the song changes meaning and evokes such different emotions with the simple shift of a couple half-steps (only one if you're in melodic minor!). Regardless of whether or not you prefer the original, this video sparks an interesting conversation about how and why music speaks to us a certain way.
Transposition can be an incredibly powerful tool in music. And it shows here. It's strange the way that the version in major matches the bright, sepia aesthetic of their music video, but the minor matches the imagery they use and in many ways the lyrics. It feels like the original story of the song has now changed, I'm not sure how I feel about the difference between the two or which one I like better, but I guess that's not really the point. The point is that the tone of music has a great effect on us and that's why artists use it the way they do.
This is mind blowing. I grew up to this style of music because of my father and i remember always listening to this song on long car rides and it is crazy to just see the whole perspective of this song being shifted. It seems so uplifting rather than a bit of a downer. I love both versions to be quite honest. they convey two very different moods while saying the same message. Very cool experiment, I wonder how it would sound with other songs.
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