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Feb. 21st, 2019 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellwayI work in a store with a background radio, which means I have a fairly good grasp of what Currently Popular Songs *sound* like but very little idea of who made them, what they're called, and in some cases the lyrics.
And I keep being, just, utterly shocked to learn that a song was by Ed Sheeran. I thought I knew what Ed Sheeran's voice sounded like! I thought I was better at voice recognition than this!
It would be one thing if he had just, like, adopted an American accent. But not only do "Shape of You" and "Perfect" not sound like they're the same person as "Bloodstream", they don't sound like they're the same person *as each other*!
(IIRC, I didn't *guess* "Castle on the Hill", but it was a lot less surprising than these two.)
---
Admittedly, I do remember having a very similar experience the first time I heard a Phil Collins' Greatest Hits CD when I was ten or so: "wait, all of these songs on the radio were the same person?" And having to infer whether the radio was playing Billy Joel or Elton John by whether my parents played that particular song on tape a lot (they are both big Billy Joel fans, but have much weaker feelings about Elton John).
But I felt like my voice recognition got suddenly much better when I was thirteen, and now I'm not so sure.
(Or maybe it *did* get better but has now gotten worse again for some reason? Shame I can't just go ask my fourteen-year-old self to listen to a 2019 pop mix and figure out which songs are by the same people. No matter how accurate my *model* of fourteen-year-old me is, a model would still be running on the current substrate, which possibly sucks at this.)
And I keep being, just, utterly shocked to learn that a song was by Ed Sheeran. I thought I knew what Ed Sheeran's voice sounded like! I thought I was better at voice recognition than this!
It would be one thing if he had just, like, adopted an American accent. But not only do "Shape of You" and "Perfect" not sound like they're the same person as "Bloodstream", they don't sound like they're the same person *as each other*!
(IIRC, I didn't *guess* "Castle on the Hill", but it was a lot less surprising than these two.)
---
Admittedly, I do remember having a very similar experience the first time I heard a Phil Collins' Greatest Hits CD when I was ten or so: "wait, all of these songs on the radio were the same person?" And having to infer whether the radio was playing Billy Joel or Elton John by whether my parents played that particular song on tape a lot (they are both big Billy Joel fans, but have much weaker feelings about Elton John).
But I felt like my voice recognition got suddenly much better when I was thirteen, and now I'm not so sure.
(Or maybe it *did* get better but has now gotten worse again for some reason? Shame I can't just go ask my fourteen-year-old self to listen to a 2019 pop mix and figure out which songs are by the same people. No matter how accurate my *model* of fourteen-year-old me is, a model would still be running on the current substrate, which possibly sucks at this.)
