Descaler
Having spent a fair chunk of my blogging time yesterday talking about rating scales, this Financial Times piece came as an eye-opener.
“Practice does not help. Neither, surprisingly, does varying the gaps in the scale: it’s no easier to distinguish five sounds between “very loud” and “very quiet” than between “fairly loud” and “fairly quiet”. Some people have perfect pitch and can transcend these limits when it comes to musical tones, but there seem to be few other exceptions. No wonder so many reviews use a scale of one to five stars.”
If true this would not only explain why so many reviews use a scale of one to five stars, but why – when presented with a wider scale – reviewers tend to cluster in the middle or at one end of it. Sadly the FT is somewhat vague about citing its sources in this piece.
Here is my own experiential contribution to scale research – which bears this out to some extent. On Popular, as you know, I have a 1 to 10 scale, and there’s a fair amount of discrimination within it. But my internal method of alloting marks tends to be:
1. Go on instinct whether a record is good (6-10) or not good (1-5).
2. Discriminate within those ranges.
So I’m still using the five-degrees rule, I’m just chunking records into subcategories before applying it. This is also what I do when ordering end-of-year lists by the way (yes, we’re getting deep into Hornby territory here!): I put everything into 4 or 5 baskets, then sort within each basket until I get granularity.
I suspect this is an iterative process – i.e. the Pitchfork 101 point scale LOOKS ridiculous, but not if the reviewers use a series of decisions to differentiate. Is this good Y/N? Is it a 6/7/8/9/10? Is it a high or low 7? Is it 7.1 7.2 7.3? OK, it’s still ridiculous. I love using it though!
Tom in FT /Proven By Science • Pop • 150 views
Ha, I’ll still defend the (pseudo?)precision of the Pfork scale. (1) That precision is probably — and probably accidentally — the most significant shift in quantitative (and maybe by extension qualitative?) music reviewing (e.g. how do we “empirically” rank this stuff) of this decade easy, and (2) again, the precision is only as significant as readers understand it to be. I know from experience reading and occasionally writing for Pitchfork that just about everyone who reads it knows well enough what the difference between a 7.4 and a 7.9 is. (The 7.9 review is the one that the reviewer either secretly or against his/her better judgment thought about pushing into the solid recommendation category but was dissuaded for some reason.) I’ve noticed that the editorial voices have been better about expanding the Best New Music category to include these sorts of “qualified endorsement” picks.
The decimal points also give a review character in a weird way — the score itself becomes expressive, at times a creative decision in and of itself. It’s less a “scale of 1 to 10″ with limited options (as you might be asked to choose in a survey) and more a “how do I feel the rating” or “what is the potential impact of this decimal point over that one?” Which sounds silly but can be a very interesting outlet for expressing something you can’t get out in WORDS, e.g. “this album is ONE DECIMAL POINT HIGHER than that thing we liked last week,” when that particular album has nothing to do with this one. Or, more commonly, “this album is THREE DECIMAL POINTS HIGHER than this band’s last one” actually gives you a weirdly accurate picture of the band’s development.
When an outlet uses a five star system, I do tend to find my eye drawn to the edges of the scale – five or one-starred (or none-starred!) If the reviewer is allowed to go up to 10 then for whatever reason these extremes just don’t come up as much, and hence there are NO reviews that catch my eye immediately. Then again, like Tom I don’t really read reviews unless it’s written by someone I know and they’ve shoved a link under my nose.
It’s high time that a negative aspect became standard practice for review scales, so that lousy music can receive the sub-zero status it truly deserves. For instance, on a scale of minus five to plus five, Yellow by Clayplod might score minus three, Chasing Cars by Snore Patrol minus four, that feculent Kid Cock mash-up obscenity from last year minus five, and anything by Nickelback minus fifty. I think the closest anyone has come to this so far remains the occasion when Smash Hits gave an FR David album nought out of ten.