Re: [microsound] I don't care how he did it, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

[Sean Cooper <scooper@xxxxxxxx>]

i disagree with this. first, you've skipped from not wanting to list who
plays what to not wanting to show pictures. i couldn't care less what you
look like playing your instrument, but i do care about the instruments
being played. it's not so very hard for me to know that a guitar and a
bass and a drumkit are being used because these are more or less known
quantities to me. i'm also quite familiar with the sound of a reverb pedal
and a delay pedal and so forth. listening to computer-made music, however,
i am less able to tell just by listening what is going on. does that
affect my perception of the music? indubitably. does it matter? that is
debatable; i don't think it does -- listing this or that computer program
or the name of a patch or whatever on the sleeve is not likely to
influence my conception of the music one way or the other -- but then who
is to say? i can say that i enjoyed during atom heart's recent show in san
francisco seeing what he was doing on the overhead projector. seeing him
loading samples and tweaking them and looping things and adjusting levels
and dropping things in and out and so forth. i would like to see the same
thing in a laptop performance.

as for kim's assertion that we are all being duped by the media in terms
of our wanting musicians to be computer geniuses, i don't think that's
really what's going on here, at least not from my angle. i'm just
interested in what is going on in the music, and knowing that can help me
to appreciate it on more or different levels than not knowing it. if i
didn't understand how, say, scratching works, then scratching would
probably sound to me like it does to most pedestrian listeners -- like a
lot of vaguely organized noise with very little artistry behind
it. perhaps there is a concern that there are unreasonable expectations by
listeners about what is going on behind the curtain, and that educating
them would give them only a superficial sense of what is happening -- one
that doesn't do the whole thing justice. then again, maybe exploding the
myth of the magician/performer (which more than the computer genius is the
one i see being promulgated by the media) is a path to better appreciating
the creative process itself, which is after all what music -- particularly
experimental music -- is. i agree with many posters that it is the end
result that is important, not who wrote what patch for whom and whether or
not stradivarius was a good violinist. but both understanding and not
understanding how music is being made inflects my experience of it; given
the choice, i'll take understanding.

"so read a book..." etc.

sc

On Mon, 20 Nov 2000, Joshua Maremont wrote:

> At 12:26 PM 11/20/00 -0500, A Listener wrote:
> >I would feel a lot better if, like on a CD it says Blank played guitar; X
> >played the drums so on . . .
> 
> I must disagree completely here.  I have played in the past in a "rock" 
> band, and we made a point of never mentioning names, equipment, 
> instruments, or any other personal or technical details.  Our reason had 
> nothing to do with hiding or honesty or credit, but rather with the 
> integrity of the listening experience, for our hope was that listeners 
> would simply imagine whatever world was conjured for them by our music 
> rather than prosaically picturing each of us arrayed on stage and tweaking 
> our piles of gear.  I continue to feel this way at present and have taken 
> the same approach on more recent record texts, and for me gear lists tend 
> to spoil records (see, for example, Francisco Lopez' suggestion that the 
> sealed liner notes of "La Selva" remain unread).  To me, as soon as the 
> technical details need to be disclosed to the listener, the other 
> nonmusical aesthetic details - hair by X, clothes by Y - become equally 
> relevant, and the credits sprawl out into Spandau Ballet territory.  What 
> brand of boots, for example, was this musician wearing while placing a foot 
> on a floor monitor during a headbanging Powerbook solo?  What restaurant 
> cooked the meal eaten by the group before the recording?  Perhaps the beer 
> provided by the studio or the club altered the playing somewhat, a belch 
> from a too-heavily frothing brew provoking stochastic mousing by the 
> player?  Either it is a good record or not.  Either it works or not.  I 
> will take brilliance on presets (see, for example, Anthony Manning's 
> "Islets in Pink Polypropylene," all done on a Roland R8) over twaddle on 
> original patches any day, although having played with Reaktor for a little 
> while I CAN hear the difference between the two...
> 
> joshua maremont / thermal - mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> boxman studies label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/
> 
> 
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