Music: Subjective or Objective?

[Rickulus]

Recently I had a debate with someone about whether music can be judged objectively or if it is conpletely subjective. I personally believe music is entirely subjective, but what are your thoughts?

I'm really looking forward to reading all your replies:)

[jc90]

Not completely subjective, but i'd say mostly subjective. There's no way (that I know of) to accurately quantify how universally good a song is or isn't.

 

That being said, there are large trends and universal tastes in music that apply to a majority of us. Example, the pleasantness of 4/4 time or how we see the same 4 chords in a lot of hit songs because they sound good to us.

 

The wonderful thing about music is that it IS subjective and that forums like this exist to debate how good song A is versus song B. But of course there is no true answer, so the debate continues until someone can upload a song onto a computer and have it spit out a score.

 

I typed out a longish rant about this that I ended up deleting but the bottom line is, if the song sounds good to you, then you've got yourself a good song.

[Arantza]

I think it's all subjective.

 

I don't know much about music but I guess you can judge some technical aspects of it, which would make it kind of objective...

But at the same time I don't think you can completely ignore all of your personal taste and past experiences and everything that influences on whether you think something is good or bad, unless you are a machine.

 

I typed out a longish rant about this that I ended up deleting but the bottom line is, if the song sounds good to you, then you've got yourself a good song.

This reminded me of this video

[jc90]

^exactly. There is no good or bad music. Only music that speaks to you and music that doesn't.

[Sparky]

Very difficult to be objective when listening to music. Wouldn't say impossible. You could just be listening to a band you haven't heard before but you'll eventually (and probably very quickly) give rise to some sort of liking or disliking of that music.

 

Which is why pretty much any debate on here or any music forum is going to be like the GIF Gai posted the other day (Going in circles!)

[beastwars]

Mostly subjective, but saying that a song is good only because you like it it's wrong imho. There are a lot of parameters you can use to judge a song (chords, lyrics, metric, genre, arrangement, ...), so it's easy to compare a song to another of the same (or similar) nature and you can now if it's good or not in a more objective way than the simple "I like it".

In the end, for me it's 70% subjective 30% objective

[jc90]

There are a lot of parameters you can use to judge a song (chords, lyrics, metric, genre, arrangement, ...), so it's easy to compare a song to another of the same (or similar) nature

 

True but

a) you can't concretely quantify those parameters

 

and

 

b) those quantities are complete arbitrary and subject to a person's tastes and bias

 

Me ranking Clocks an 8/10 is not the same as you ranking it an 8/10. 8/10 means different things to different people. For another example, see our coldplaying polls once in a while. I'm often amazed how often we see things ranked 10/10. To me, there are perhaps only a handful of things that are truly worth that mark, yet we see them very often.