World's Toughest Milkman
I think it makes the most sense to keep them separate, but I agree with your suggested changes to the description, since those match the overwhelming majority of the examples. (And don't actually require much change to the descriptions.) It seems like most people thought they work the way you suggested. Certainly I always did. :)
I don't see a reason for a rename. The name seems clear enough, and if we're adjusting the description to match the (mild) misuse, then there's even less reason for a rename. Renames are always very disruptive, and are only considered as a very last resort, when all else has failed.
edited 19th Jan '18 12:19:08 PM by Xtifr
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.
Why didn't you add the trope name to the thread's headline?!
The TRS instructions, if I read them correctly (this is the first time I've made a TRS topic, so it's entirely possible I didn't), indicate that topics about two tropes shouldn't use the trope titles in their names. I assume this is because titles listing too many trope titles could quickly get unwieldy, though I don't really understand why the cutoff isn't three rather than two. If I've misconstrued the instructions, a mod is perfectly welcome to amend the topic title (I'm not sure if I can do it myself).
I'd be fine having the descriptions rewritten the way I've suggested (I'd even be willing to rewrite them myself), but the task of making sure all the examples on the trope pages (much less other pages) match the rewritten descriptions would be a gargantuan one, and I certainly have neither the time nor the means to do it right now. (Then again, I suspect that Xtifr is probably right and well upwards of 90% of those examples already use the tropes in the manner I'd suggested.)
edited 20th Jan '18 6:48:26 PM by CassandraLeo
No, the other one.
The way I understand them is that Fading into the Next Song is just the use of crossfade in album versions of songs. Siamese Twin Songs is about songs that are essentially one song in two (or more) parts. That definition doesn't sound nebulous to me, but the problem comes with how music tropes tend to lack context, be full of varying interpretations, and overall be messier than other tropes. Reading the page doesn't give me an impression that there's a significant problem, though.
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Yeah, you or somebody needs to add the tropes to the title of this thread.
- Yeah, you or somebody needs to add the tropes to the title of this thread.
If it's possible to edit the title, I don't know how to do it. I suspect that to avert confusion, normal users aren't allowed to edit thread titles after a certain amount of time; this is fairly common on forums. But I haven't used the TV Tropes forum much, so it's possible there's some button I don't know about.
- The way I understand them is that Fading into the Next Song is just the use of crossfade in album versions of songs. Siamese Twin Songs is about songs that are essentially one song in two (or more) parts.
Your first sentence matches how I read them now, too, but the second one doesn't. "One song in two (or more) parts" isn't a description of "On the Run" and "Time", but the current description indicates that, AFAICT, they are Siamese Twin Songs. It isn't one song in two parts, but it's not a musical crossfade - they're linked with sound effects, which Fading into the Next Song's description explicitly says disqualifies it for that trope.note The Siamese Twin Songs description is really nebulous, but if it's supposed to list only examples where a band plays continuously, then there's no page for examples like "On the Run"/"Time" - which makes zero sense to me.
Moreover, to name another metal example, nearly all of Deathspell Omega's Paracletus uses transitions that fit under the current description of Siamese Twin Songsnote , but the songs are very distinctnote . They're not really "one song in two parts", but they're still disqualified under the current Fading into the Next Song description.
Or, for a much better-known example of the same thing, see Pink Floyd's "Us and Them" into "Any Colour You Like". Almost never played together on the radio, not always even played together by the band, and definitely two separate songs, but disqualified under the current Fading into the Next Song description, because the transition isn't a crossfade. So if they don't qualify under the current descriptions of either Siamese Twin Songs or Fading into the Next Song, then an awful lot of continuous song transitions are disqualified from both tropes. I can't imagine that was intended when the tropes were created.
(TBH, "one song in two parts" seems like such a nebulous definition that I'd put it in YMMV territory. I suppose one could argue that if a certain number of melodic elements are reused between them, it qualifies - but how many need to be reused? That's a can of worms that I don't even want to contemplate at this hour of night. And, for that matter, "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" are an archetypal example of this trope, but have little in common melodically or, for that matter, even rhythmically; the former is 4/4 and the latter is 6/8 or 3/4, depending upon how one counts it. "DJs play these songs together on the radio or the band plays them together live" is a lot more easily quantifiable and less likely to be a source of disagreement.)
In any case, I read them a different way for five years, and judging from Xtifr's response, I'm not alone. It's not so much a nebulous definition as an arbitrary one with edge cases that could fit into either trope - e.g., when a band briefly stops playing but begins the next song before the previous one fades to silencenote - and it's worded so poorly that many other editors on the wiki also appear to misunderstand it. This could be fixed for future additions to the wiki by clarifying the descriptions - but we'd still be left with the massive number of examples on the wrong pages.
And, to be honest, I don't really care whether two songs crossfade, or whether the band just keeps playing and divided their performance into two songs, or whether they linked the songs with sound effects. A lot of the songs on these trope lists are songs I've never heard, and it makes zero difference to me whether My Chemical Romance or Pain of Salvation (to name two random artists I'm unfamiliar with whom I suspect frequently use gapless transitions) used a crossfade or a sound effect segue. It's not a noteworthy enough distinction to justify the trope split to me. (I care slightly in the case of songs I've actually heard, but still nowhere near enough to justify dividing these into two or more separate pages of examples.)
As currently constituted, the two trope descriptions just describe different types of gapless transitions. I could at most see a justification for splitting the Fading into the Next Song page into numbered types, à la Religion Rant Song and Metal Scream - I'd suggest 1. "crossfade", 2. "continuous performance split into multiple tracks", 3. "linked by sound effects", 4. "other gapless transition"note , 5. "multiple" note . That would be a lot of work, but probably less than moving all the examples across trope pages (and also recategorising them on every single work page that misuses them, which is probably thousands). But at least, if they were on the same page, but split by number, they'd still be on the same page.
I don't think "type of gapless transition" is a significant enough distinction to justify two separate tropes, though, and I'm going to need to see more reasoning than "the tropes are currently written that way" to be dissuaded from my argument that, as they stand, they're so widely misused across the wiki as to make the distinction useless. I think rewriting the trope descriptions to match how the tropes are actually used is a much more sensible response - particularly since that usage reflects a distinction that, frankly, I care far more about.
"DJs usually play these songs together" or "the band usually plays these songs together live" is a notable enough distinction to me to justify having its own page. It's describing a meaningfully different thing, because only a small number of gapless tracks are commonly played together by DJs or in live shows. And I think it's interesting to know that "Livin' Lovin' Maid" is almost always played after "Heartbreaker" on the radio, while I can't think of a single reason having the gapless transition for "Money" and "Us and Them" on a different trope page than the one for "On the Run" and "Time" would actually make anyone's existence any easier - particularly if they hadn't heard the songs before.
Others may disagree, of course. But I think rewriting the descriptions is not only easier than recategorising all the examples, but it reflects a much more interesting dichotomy as well.
In fact, to that end, I went ahead and wrote proposed amendments to the trope descriptions, because what the hell - it didn't look like I'd be getting anything else done tonight, anyway. Here they are. I reused a fair amount of text that applied to both tropes. Feel free to suggest further amendments; in particular, I tend to be extremely verbose in my first draftsnote , so if you see a way to make either/both of these more concise without eliding clarity/meaning, go for it. (George Orwell: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out." Winston Churchill also wrote several memos advising brevity that, ironically, are not actually that brief or memorable.) I also tend to go in for Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness without really thinking about it, so if you can simplify my language, feel free to do that, too. (Orwell: "Never use a long word when a short one will do"; Churchill: "Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are the best of all.")
Fading into the Next Song
Most of the time, songs on an album are discrete. One song fades to silence, and then the next one begins afterward. These are the exceptions. Perhaps there's a crossfade, where one song begins before its predecessor has finished fading out. Perhaps two songs are linked with sound effects. Perhaps a continuous performance is just divided into two or more tracks (maybe the performance is really long, so the band wanted to make it easier to navigate, or maybe they just felt two segments were thematically different enough to merit separation). In any case, if you play the first song without the second immediately after it, the first song will end with a sudden cut to silence.
In written music, this is referred to as a "segue" (pronounced like "Segway"). This is a common practice for mix albums for "dance floor" Electronic Music genres like House Music and Trance, as the objective is to create a seamless listening experience. It's also common in mixtapes, and it's particularly common in Progressive Rock and other related genres, as well as on anything described as a Concept Album. When an album doesn't have silence between any of its songs, it's considered a "gapless album" (exceptions may be made for divisions between LP sides).
A musical cousin to the Cliffhanger. Siamese Twin Songs is a subtrope referring to cases where two songs that do this become so inseparable that they are ubiquitously played together live or on the radio. If two songs are Siamese Twin Songs, they'll also be an example of this trope, but the reverse is not necessarily the case - The Dark Side of the Moon is gapless the whole way through with the exception of its side break, but DJs usually play only specific parts of it (though it still has its pairs of Siamese Twin Songs), and after about 1975, Pink Floyd didn't always play the whole album live. The earlier songs in Fading into the Next Song pairings could also be considered, in a way, to have No Ending.
Note that crowd noise between songs on live albums does not qualify for this trope - it's too much a case of People Sit On Chairs to be listed here. On the other hand, if a band doesn't stop playing between two songs on a live album, that does qualify for this trope. If crowd noise is used as a sound effect transition on a studio album (Tears for Fears did this on both Songs from the Big Chair and The Seeds of Love, for example), that also counts.
If downloaded, they generally come as separate files; if ripped from a Compact Disc, they almost always do, unless the software is specifically instructed otherwise.note Fortunately, there is software to combine them into one file, at least if they are in MP 3, lossless, or open-source formats, thus eliminating the annoyance of hearing what sounds like a song ending in the middle when playing songs in random order (shuffle mode).
Because some commonly used lossy formats such as MP3 and AAC actually insert brief segments of silence at the beginning and end of each track, less sophisticated media players will play that silence and, thus, don't play gapless transitions correctly. (Ogg Vorbis is true gapless - there is no silence at the beginning or end of songs - but is far less widely supported than either MP3 or AAC.) Many of the most popular players, such as iTunes, the iPhone, and foobar2000, have workarounds for this, but many other less commonly used ones, including an awful lot of car stereos, do not. A workaround for those possessing lossless versions of the album (and with players that don't support Ogg) is to make a new lossy rip combining each set of gapless songs into one file (most software offers options to encode multiple songs as a single file).
Siamese Twin Songs
There's Fading into the Next Song, when two songs don't have silence between them, and then there are these. Siamese Twin Songs are two (or more) linked songs that have become so inseparable that DJs would get complaints if they played one without the other, and where fans expect the band to play them together live.
In nearly all cases, if you play the first song without the second, there'll be an abrupt and, usually, obvious cut to silence (Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" and "Livin' Lovin' Maid" are a rare exception, though the gap between them lasts for less than half a second). In many cases, the first song may be an Epic Instrumental Opener, particularly if it is the first song on an album.
A musical cousin to the Cliffhanger, and a subtrope of Fading into the Next Song. This trope applies only to songs that are usually twinned in live performances or in radio airplay; if songs segue together, but DJs and/or the band commonly break them up, they're a case of Fading into the Next Song instead. (For example, Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" are Siamese Twin Songs; "Us and Them" and "Any Colour You Like" are not.) The earlier songs in these pairings could also be considered, in a way, to have No Ending.
If downloaded, they generally come as separate files; if ripped from a Compact Disc, they almost always do, unless the software is specifically instructed otherwise.note Fortunately, there is software to combine them into one file, at least if they are in MP 3, lossless, or open-source formats, thus eliminating the annoyance of hearing what sounds like a song ending in the middle when playing songs in random order (shuffle mode).
Because some commonly used lossy formats such as MP3 and AAC actually insert brief segments of silence at the beginning and end of each track, less sophisticated media players will play that silence and, thus, don't play gapless transitions correctly. (Ogg Vorbis is true gapless - there is no silence at the beginning or end of songs - but is far less widely supported than either MP3 or AAC.) Many of the most popular players, such as iTunes, the iPhone, and foobar2000, have workarounds for this, but many other less commonly used ones, including an awful lot of car stereos, do not. A workaround for those possessing lossless versions of the album (and with players that don't support Ogg) is to make a new lossy rip combining each set of gapless songs into one file (most software offers options to encode multiple songs as a single file).
Not to be confused with the "Siamese Twins Song" from Big Fish or any other songs with the words "Siamese" or "Twins" in the title. Also not a trope for two songs that are conceptually linked but aren't played consecutively.
edited 20th Jan '18 9:38:06 PM by CassandraLeo
"I could at most see a justification for splitting the Fading into the Next Song page into numbered types, à la Religion Rant Song and Metal Scream - I'd suggest 1. "crossfade", 2. "continuous performance split into multiple tracks", 3. "linked by sound effects", 4. "other gapless transition"note , 5. "multiple" note ."
No. A continuous performance is not a fade, a link by sound effect is not a fade. We should not class transitions that are not a fade under a trope name that has the word "Fading" in it.
These after all really are two separate concepts. If you listen to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", the reprise of the title track fades out as the guitar strumming of "A Day in the Life" begins. That's Fading into the Next Song. If you listen to "Abbey Road", they recorded "Polythene Pam" and "She Came Into The Bathroom Window" in the same session as one performance without a gap and without a fade. That's Siamese Twin Song. Those are definitely two different things. If we decide that it's a distinction without a difference or a distinction not important enough to have two different tropes, we would have to come up with a new trope name that includes both, like Gapless Transition.
edited 20th Jan '18 11:30:43 PM by jamespolk
World's Toughest Milkman
Main/FadingIntoTheNextSong found in: 405 articles, excluding discussions.
Since January 1, 2012 this article has brought 2,123 people to the wiki from non-search engine links.
Main/SiameseTwinSongs found in: 214 articles, excluding discussions.
Since January 1, 2012 this article has brought 991 people to the wiki from non-search engine links.
Those are fairly solid numbers. To change the definitions, we'd need a Wick Check. If a wick check shows a strong pattern that doesn't quite match the definition, changing the definition is usually the preferred action, if it's a reasonable change (and a proper trope). Which I think is the case here.
Unfortunately, we really can't proceed much farther without the wick check. But if it really shows what was claimed (and I find it easy to believe it will), this should be fairly straightforward to fix. The suggested write-up is maybe a little long, but seems to hit the important points.
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.
If it helps in figuring out what it was originally supposed to be, this
is the oldest version of Siamese Twin Songs the Internet Archive has.
World's Toughest Milkman
Ah, very good! That does indeed look like it was intended to be what Cassandra wants (and what several of us thought it was). Looks like we have a case of trope drift. Which definitely makes things easier. A wick check is not entirely mandatory in such cases.
Going back to something more like the original description seems like the best solution to me.
We might also add something about how this can happen. Something like:
"Typically, the second song will start on the beat, and will be in the same key, or a harmonically related one, leading to an initial impression that the new song is merely a bridge. In extreme cases, especially with jam bands and prog rockers, there may be an actual extended bridge or instrumental section tying the two songs together seamlessly."
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.
Clock is set.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Clock's up; locking for lack of activity/consensus. No action is to be taken on the basis of this thread.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Fading into the Next Song and Siamese Twin Songs are, to put it diplomatically, a mess. The distinction between them is at best nebulous. The way the trope descriptions currently sit, I think the former is for songs that are crossfaded in the manner of a mixtape (e.g., "Money" into "Us and Them"), whereas the latter is for songs that either are connected with sound effects (e.g., "On the Run" into "Time") or are (or at least sound like) a single, continuous performance that got split into multiple tracks (e.g., "Brain Damage" into "Eclipse"). I'm not actually 100% sure this is correct, and if it is, then I misunderstood the descriptions for... probably at least five years, even though I'm pretty sure they haven't changed in any meaningful way for at least that long. (The descriptions aren't very clear; in fact, the Siamese Twin Songs page doesn't even explain how that trope differs from Fading into the Next Song.)
One problem is that Siamese Twin Songs, according to these descriptions, is not really describing one form of transition between songs. It's describing two completely different methods of transitioning between songs, and if the distinction between a crossfade and the other two methods of transition is significant enough to merit having crossfading as its own trope, then under that standard, Siamese Twin Songs should actually be split into at least two tropes. But given the problems that already exist with these tropes, that would be moving things in the exact wrong direction.
The bigger problem comes from the fact that even if we keep the current distinctions intact, they're still quite nebulous. For instance, if a band stops playing for a few seconds, and then starts playing again before the instruments fade to silence, is that Siamese Twin Songs, Fading into the Next Song, or both? The current descriptions don't make this clear, and this kind of transition happens fairly often - for instance, Deathspell Omega's "Abscission" into "Dearth", and then again with "Phosphene" into "Epiklesis II" (vinyl edition excluded).
Moreover, editors don't always understand the difference, and I'm not convinced that revising the descriptions would help much. A few miscategorisations on the Fading into the Next Song trope page: "Parabol"/"Parabola" by tool is actually Siamese Twin Songs - if anything, the end of "Parabol" gets louder rather than fading out. Similarly, several of the Slayer examples on the Fading page seem to be Siamese Twin Songs examples, and Between the Buried and Me and Pink Floyd are listed as having several albums of nothing but Fading into the Next Song when, in fact, many transitions on those albums are actually Siamese Twin Songs.
On the other hand, the Siamese Twin Songs page seems to be mostly a list of songs that are usually played together on the radio and/or live, with little regard for what kind of transition they employ. (If we have to keep these as two different tropes, that actually seems like a much better distinction, because it's describing something with a much less arbitrary distinction than "kind of gapless transition". This is, in fact, what I thought the distinction between the tropes was for about five years. If the tropes are altered to have this dichotomy, "twinned songs in live performance/on the radio" would be a sensible subtrope of "gapless tracks".) On the other hand, the trope name is also frequently outright misunderstood - The Smashing Pumpkins' page has several examples that aren't examples of either trope (not least because the first two pairs of songs aren't even on the same album), but instead are thematically linked songs that were released separately. I haven't edited them out yet for the sake of this post (I will do so later), but for history's sake, these are the three currently offending examples:
At least "Tonight, "Tonight" and "Tonite Reprise" do appear on the same release in two cases - the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness vinyl and the "Tonight, Tonight" single - but on neither of these do they appear sequentially, much without gaps between them. Meanwhile, several actual cases of Siamese Twin Songs from the Pumpkins' discography - the most obvious example off the top of my head is "Where Boys Fear to Tread"/"Bodies", but "Spaceboy"/"Silverfuck", (arguably) "Tales of a Scorched Earth"/"Thru the Eyes of Ruby", and a lot of others also qualify - aren't listed on their page under this trope; indeed, "Where Boys Fear to Tread"/"Bodies" are actually currently on the Pumpkins' page under Fading into the Next Song, just to drive home the widespread confusion about the dichotomy. (I wasn't the one who added them, but I had to look up the page history to make sure. Again, I will correct this later. I suppose I could correct them now and other people could look up the page history, but I want to make it convenient for them.)
Personally, I say combine the two tropes and change the name to something less easy to misinterpret, like "Gapless Song Transition" or "Continuous Song Transition". I definitely think such a trope should still exist (particularly since my car stereo doesn't play them correctly, making such lists a useful way of knowing which songs to encode together without having to manually check), but the way these two are divided on this wiki is so commonly misunderstood that it'd probably be easier just to make them a single trope and call it a day than it would be to try to get everyone to understand and follow the descriptions. And, as I've said, if they have to stay as separate tropes, I think making Siamese Twin Songs a trope for songs that usually get played together live and/or on the radio is a much better distinction than the current one. Probably 70% of the examples on the trope page (that I'm familiar with, at least) already qualify under that description anyway. (And if we keep it, it should still probably be renamed to avoid the aforementioned confusion - "Inseparable Songs", maybe.)
edited 18th Jan '18 6:18:28 PM by CassandraLeo