[Arggh, I feel the hostility meter starting to flutter into the red… If that’s the case, I’m outta here.]
Don’t know why such a list of commands wouldn’t cut it to bring some sense of life to a piece. Composers use such notations all the time to indicate precisely what they need from performers, and Talan M’s work is a composition, not a performance, however much he may intend it to sound “performed.” And there’s no reason these controls couldn’t be implemented live in real time with foot pedals or something, so there’s plenty of room for overlap between composition and performance.
I don’t believe improvisation can ever be totally in the “moment.” Improvisors are always recycling and borrowing from buried experience and spinning motifs, etc. The idea of the mind as blank slate creating order out of nothingness just doesn’t “cut it” for me.
m
really think you're missing the point. for one thing Ayler would turn over in his grave; his work was about black spirituality in the moment. for another, the point I was making was a bit similar; there's a philosophical / aesthetic diff. between live and composed in Talan's sense.
and third - sorry, but that ctl stuff just doesn't cut it.
- Alan
On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, mwp wrote:
While I agree with AS that no computer will ever reproduce the nuanced touch of a human performer, there are many things one could do to flesh out today's generic samples and make them sound more “human.”
Just as in video games where the player picks out the specific features his avatar will have – speed, strength, etc. – I can envisage a music program – maybe it already exists? – that allows the performer to pick from a number of settings so as to personalize and "humanize" each instrument, such as
SAXOPHONE:
Flatten the pitch in the upper registers YES
Squeak SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-S
Pad SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-P
Breath SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-B
Force virtual fingering SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-V
Etc.
OR:
One could set up a training algorithm that listens to recordings of Albert Ayler, say, and picks out his performance idiosyncrasies and codifies them in some way so that the musician can select not merely from a set of a generic saxophone samples but "Ayler," "Coletrane," "Coleman," "Young," etc. more or less, as virtually re-enacted by statistical analysis.
m
On Dec 18, 2005, at 4:50 PM, Talan Memmott wrote:
If I had composed these pieces and they were played by musicians
rather than the computer triggering samples I think the qualities you
mention would be there...
Throughout most of my life I've played music and have been surround by
players... The [N]+Semble stuff is a sort of therapy for dealing with
not being around musicians at the moment and needing to produce sound.
The pieces are not improvisations, but a way of also honing some
composition and arranging concepts... What you hear is a sonic
reproduction of the score, rather than the piece played by musicians
(especially with most of the Blue Node tracks)... Though, I try my
best to make the tracks sound good, and more than just scratch tracks
for my own purposes... If they were the latter, I wouldn't put them
out there.
The sampling thing is understood, of course... The sax seems
particularly difficult in terms of even slightly sounding authentic...
because of the things you mention...
On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 19:13:18 -0500
Alan Sondheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi - I think it would be quite difficult to program the noise
elements -
which are signifiers of organism, of the physico-inert world of
material
labor, production, and living-in/inhabiting music as an ongoing
activity -
for a number of reasons. You won't be able to find _any_ sample able
to
reproduce them; they're different for every note (i.e. noise changes
as
valves change); they're different because the same note can be played
with
different fingerings; they're different because every time the same
note
is played with the same fingering, it's: a. coming off perhaps of a
different note, and b. coming off of different breathing, etc. This
is
Benjamin's 'aura' in a sense at its worst, but in some jazz, I'd say
people like Coleman Hawkins or the Aylers or even Coleman, it's
critical;
jazz is a lived experience. I know even in the 60s that changed w/
things
like the Boston School of Music producing a lot of session people,
and one
of the ideas of session of course is more or less exact
reproducibility
which is why so much programmatic music and even 'fusion' is digital.
For myself, maybe it's one area, i.e. guitar, where I can step away
from
the computer, where I'm dealing with the material world in real time,
where an error remains an error (if I'm recording, of course even if
not,
but then it's only my own), where I'm shape-riding as if falling down
a
vortex and swimming at the same time. So we have different approaches
to
sound; when I was recording the different recent cds, I recorded each
piece directly on the heels of the other; they're completely
improvised
but there's going to be an 'influence' from one to another, and less
and
less from the outside. It's a kind of breathing -
Alan
For URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see
http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt .
Contact: Alan Sondheim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
General
directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org .
For URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt .
Contact: Alan Sondheim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] General
directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org .
