> They are > good enough to fool experts (composers and professors of music)
Just a little corolary here - EMI fools pros much better in certain types of emulation than it does in others. Interestingly, trained musicians can usually spot EMI's Bach more often than, for example, EMI's Chopin. You might think it would be the other way, around, since Bach adheres more strictly to certain sets of quantifiable rules of architecture than Chopin (you can find classes in Bach-style counterpoint much more often than you can in Chopin-style piano writing, for example.) But I think it might be the very nature of an "anything goes" approach in Chopin that makes deviations from the norm much more easy to be fooled by. This brings me to my next point.... > In my opinion, and based purely on the above, software such as EMI could not > produce great techno because of the priority given to the characteristics of > the sounds used (especially where effects and "found" samples are > concerned), rather than the rules of musical theory behind their > arrangement. I'm not sure that's entirely true. First of all, plenty of techno adheres quite strongly to some version of common-practice tonality. It's often very easy to find key centers and even passages of functional harmony (V-I progressions, for example, at both the local and large-scale levels, abound in minimal house/tech-house.) Secondly, there are certainly timbral characteristics that we've come to associate with various forms of techno - the noisy filtered glitch of Basic Channel and the 303 squelch of acid, to name just a few. And there's plenty of software ALREADY that can do complex and nearly realtime analysis and resynthesis of audio. It doesn't "know" what it's hearing, of course, but it can mimic and vary it very convincingly. I think it's only a matter of time before computers become more independently creative and I don't see such a shift as negative at all. People will never drop out of the equation entirely. Don't forget - we make music because we enjoy it. No matter how good the technology gets, we'll never have computers do our enjoying for us :) 2 more cents, Dennis DeSantis www.mp3.com/vanderrohe --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
