On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Roger <rclo...@verizon.net> wrote: > > > And any creative act comes out of the blue if it is truly creative (new). > Improved jazs would be a good example of that. I believe that > John Coltrane's solos came out of the Platonic world. > > Roger , rclo...@verizon.net > > Hi Roger,
Jazz players do not, with possible exception of free Jazz (and even here it is debatable), play completely "out of the blue". Sure, players value the risky creative spark of playing out of the blue, but in Mike Stern's words: "If you play too much like that (getting from point A to B in a song on pure intuition, purposefully disregarding some set of the Song's fixed frame of parameters; the melody, tempo, harmony, rhythm, accents, phrasing etc.), you'll sound like you don't know what you're doing." Check out the demo version of the program "band in a box". Here you can set tempo, style and harmony, and the program will generate you a Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Herbie Hancock solo in midi commands. Of course this sounds pretty artificial as the notes are spit out as raw midi through a mediocre synthesizer in the program. But if you take those midi commands and use them as input for a rich digital sampler, programmed with thousands of notes, different articulation, phrases, and phrasing for different tempos... I think you'd be surprised at the quality. Tenor Sax is difficult to render convincingly, due to phrasing/articulation issues, and we still need a few more years and more powerful machines to do so. But Piano is much more tractable problem in this sense. Sure, I cannot convince somebody who knows Keith Jaretts improvisation of "Body and Soul" that our Computers improvise with such nuance yet (disregard the imagery of the video, if you want to hear the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY5rzzZENsE). But Keith is standing on a few hundred years of piano tradition and improvisation, while we have been coding our computers to improvise only for the last 20 years: still, in most of computer generated sample-based music today in TV, advertising, movies etc., I'd bet the majority of casual listeners already cannot tell that the pianist or orchestra is a PC somewhere with a human operator. Not many composers are open to the public about this, but composers versed in programming low-level languages, such as MAX for example, have programmed musical environments so rich, that most of what they do, after the programming, is wait for the environment to spit out something rich/interesting to them, just tweaking this value or parameter somewhere in the environment or changing just a single input, to huge effect. Most people think a big mixing desk with a hundred channels is amazing. With enough computing power, you can chain dozens of these monsters, route them through the strangest effect algorithms, and create a sonically compelling thunderstorm out of a single kick drum sample. Old famous example, how to turn a bass drum into a thunderstorm with a few virtual mixers' sends routed into each other: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL4MMJMXEFk So, we'll never turn the computer into Keith Jarett or John Coltrane. But its getting closer everyday. Even thunderstorms :) your computer can get pretty close to. There is so much interesting music out there being made today, even if its not publicly visible for commercial reasons. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
