I wouldn't think testing vocabulary would be a very good indicator of music's intelligence. In my mind, music has been getting less intelligent because the tools to make music these days have made the barrier to entry almost non-existent. No longer do you need to study and practice various musical/performance skills for years to be a musician and put out a record. All you need is a computer and some software.
It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. I think it's good that anyone can try their hand at making music, but at the same time, the saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall.
If anything, I think lowering the barriers to entry should result in higher quality hit songs. For a hit song to occur, it has to become popular, which means a certain amount of oomph.
So with 1000 songs to choose from for the hot 100, you'd expect OK songs, but with 100,000 to choose from, you'd expect in a meritocracy much better songs.
Of course, the hot 100 is hit and miss. An example of a song which was made using affordable DAW software is, I believe, Crank That by Soulja Boy which is a song I personally dislike, take that as you will.
Punk in the 70s? Crappy synths in the 80s? Distorted grunge in the 90s? Crappy samplers in the 00s?
Been plenty of great acts who couldn't play instruments well for decades, so either yes, you are getting very old or you're remembering a lot of artists being a lot better than they actually were.
>> It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. [...] The saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall.
Personally, I think it's fantastic. While mainstream pop has become overwhelmingly homogeneous over the last decade, underground and alternative hip hop have arguably become the two most innovative genres of music of the last 40 years.
That said, it works both ways, and as you pointed out the static to noise ratio is still pretty bad. I think the biggest issue is still the fact that the loudest voices get the most attention, and those voices still belong to the big three record labels.
To make decent electronic music takes considerable skill and practice.
People looking to invest the minimal amount of time required studying in order to perform is not a new phenomenon. The pop charts of previous decades were filled with pretty terrible guitar playing for example.
Sure there were some great exceptions along with a bunch of dedicated session musicians to add that professional slickness, but that's no different from today's for-hire producers.
Do these negative forces combine to make the field ripe for disruption? I think dirty loops[0] is an example of yes, but I happen to like their music. By some accounts (especially if you are old or like Steely Dan) they do music better than Justin[1], Britney[2], and Adele[3] (but they are young). The original version of [1] an unintelligent yet popular pop song.
While I agree that modern tools have some detrimental effect on the quality of music* (mainly the loss of character/feeling /"soul" because it's much harder to be expressive like a live musician when all you have is a sequencer and some synths or samples), I think there's other reason of dumbing down of pop.
When we are talking about Pop charts hits, we are talking about songs quite often made by a small set of producers. The job title of these guys is strikingly adequate. They are manufacturing a product according to the specific requirements of the record labels+radio stations ecosystem. That's why the result is so often generic - it's a result of using some formulas which are proven to work for decades.
*On the other hand the "modern" tools created so many new amazing genres and styles that the net result might be not detrimental at all :)
We already see how low-quality content can go "viral" on the internet. It seems clear popularity does not equal quality, unless you tautologically define quality as how popular it is.
It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. I think it's good that anyone can try their hand at making music, but at the same time, the saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall.
Or, maybe I'm just getting old?