[Finale] The Fallacy of Human Playback (was: How do I make Finale's interpretations go away?)

[Keef]

Message: 1 Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:04:49 -0500 From: "David W. Fenton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Finale] How do I make Finale's interpretations go away? To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII On 24 Feb 2004 at 1:21, Michael L. Meyer wrote: On 2/23/04 11:06 PM, "David W. Fenton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Of course, I can't quite conceive of why having dynamic marks and articulations in playback would interfere with aural proofreading, as one person said, or why you'd want to redo everything in the score from scratch in a hand-edited MIDI file, but I have very little imagination, I guess. I'm sending a PDF of this arrangement to the 16 or so people who will be coming together to sing it in about two weeks. What I needed was a MIDI file for them to listen to as they follow along in the chart and learn the parts on their own (they're amateur singers with various careers who run the gamut as far as music-reading ability). In this case, all they need are the pitches and rhythms; the expressions and articulations just end up being a distraction, especially considering that (again, because I ignored them in the first place) they're not set up to accurately play back what I meant when I put them in the score. Well, let me just say that while reading this I went *boggle* several times. Since when are dynamics and articulations so incredibly unimportant that you wouldn't want musicians learning them *from the beginning*? As far as I'm concerned, *all* the music is in the non-notes/non- rhythms part of the music, and by leaving that out, you're guaranteeing, in my experience, that the performers will play/sing like metronomes/synthesizers, with no nuance, no shape, no *music*. Ooh I daresay that's purely lazy musicianship.  But there are many performers (I hesitate to say musicians) who mimic what they hear rather than think about what they can do to make it theirs.  Maybe I'm an idealist.  But I digress.  (Oh yeh, while I'm at it, I think it needs to be said that synthesizers have nuance and shape but you have to have the musicianship to pull it out -- just like playing a traditional instrument.  As that skill is different from a trumpeter to a flautist to a percussionist, so it is with synthesists.  As much of my music is synthesizer based and I consider myself mainly an electronic musician, I find it really sad and more than slightly offensive that there are many traditionally based musicians who believe that I'm not a musician but a button pusher and knob tweaker -- that somehow I'm not a "real musician."  No computer program will ever be the musician for me -- that work is creative and you can't approach it linearly in thought.) Anyway, back to score preparation:  I myself prefer several different versions of MIDI files to correspond with my preparation stages -- entry, articulations, dynamics, and so forth -- it makes it easier to scrub along the way.  I might make one with no dynamics, for instance, so that things not related to dynamics might jump out -- it's like putting a colour filter over the recipe.  For performance I go back and actually play the stuff in and massage that data rather than the raw data -- it's quicker for me, I can tweak along the way, and my inability to achieve perfection is built in to the performance -- which is a good thing -- if it were perfect it wouldn't be musical. One caveat: I've not used nor heard the results of the "human playback" feature. I think what I'd like is to have the hairpins performed (by key velocity where possible, with volume controller on held notes), but not anything else. Is that configurable or is it all or nothing? It is configurable but barely -- you have to be working in certain styles, absolutely cookie cutter, no creativity, so I still consider it all or nothing.  Certainly it's not configurable in the way that you're saying.  How could it be?  The interplay of attack envelope to dynamic curve varies from instrument to instrument (say, between two trumpets -- or yet, two trumpet *players*, never mind a trumpet and a flute).  Simply put -- don't expect the nuances you want to hear from human playback, ever.  It's not in the cards.   That's what you have synthesists for, if you want to reproduce the score artificially.   Expect your imagination to be sparked, but if you play what you get for performers to give them an idea of what you want, they're still going to have to use their own interpretational chops and make a translation. Keef.

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