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"pelagius pelagius" <pela_gius@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
I have to question this assumption that keeps popping up all over the place
that somehow digital systems don't have a "sound" to them.
well i didn't exactly say that - but you need to be precise here...
sometimes you can create music where it is difficult to tell if the
process is analog or digital. you can make it sound as digital or as
analog as you like if you push things in that direction, or you can
choose to be much more ambiguous and obscure or veil the process. the
fact that you can choose this, supports an argument that the artist
is a major player in the equation.
Isn't a Max/msp
patch essentially built up of different parts like filters?
yes
but the parameter sets, their manipulation via controllers and the
sound materials put through them will be vastly different, so this is
as much a mediating factor as anything else. You can use these things
with subtlety as opposed to having the processor as the main focus.
This is a musical decision.
I'm assuming
that even if you make your own patches you're building them up out of basic
building blocks that do indeed have a certain sound.
yes, but... if you take this argument to its logical conclusion , you
would say that all electronic music sounds the same as there are a
limited number of tools which are in circulation. Would you level
this ciriticism at piano music, or orchestral music? The statement
'sounding the same' is fairly nebulous. A quartal chord on a piano
imparts a different colour to a triad, or a tone cluster. the timbre
is essentially the same in terms of its building blocks, but the
musical colours are different as a result of the stacking. i think
these beliefs about 'sounding the same' tend to come more from a
tendency in recent music to froeground or abuse the processor/s -
which is a musical decision, as opposed to an inherent sound quality
which is necessarily iomparted to all music which is made with the
tool in question. Max any processor out (pun intended) and it will
often move toward the same or at least a similar sonic point
(oscillation etc...). This strategy obviously needs to be carefully
negotiated, lest it _does_ all end up sounding the same.
The line of thinking that says "max/msp does not sound like anything"
reminds me of the late '80s early '90s belief that digital synths and
sampling could recreate any sound and therefore lets dump all of the analog
synths in the trash.
it may remind you of that argument, but it bears little relationship
if you are getting the nuance of the point i am trying to make. i'm
arguing against an oversimplification of the argument which reduces
or diminishes the decisions made by the artist. Perhaps i should
rephrase - 'max/msp does not need to sound like what you would
expect it to sound like', in fact you could be using it and no one
would be the wiser unless they looked at your screen. i'd be suprised
if people were not occasionally surprised by the tools that some
people were using.. surely you have had this experience.
Now with a bit of distance and experience, I'd hope we
all agree that a sampled waveform does not equal the original sound source
and that different samplers have different "sounds" to them.
like all different A/D converters and all filters etc...
the irony is that, given you can run the whole gamut of vst stuff
within Max/msp (including softsynths etc...) _and all the internal
objects and processors, Max/msp should have less chance of sounding
the same than just about any other commercially available piece of
software around... you don't have one filter, you have scores of
them...
i still reckon people are barking up the wrong tree with this...
"mark" <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
I suspect the reason that there is no identifiable sound
for something like max/msp is that components have
been written by a myriad of different people and of course
no two people use the same set of component in any patch.
There are a lot of different filters to choose from
for example.
right, and how they are routed and controlled is a very personal
decision which has a profound sonic effect.
I suspect that saying Max/Msp doesn't sound like anything
is a bit like saying my studio doesn't sound like anything -
of course it does but there is enough complexity that if
you came and used it say you would get very different
results out of it whereas if you came and used my XTk
then it would still sound like an XTk whether you or
I where playing it.
unless it was generating sine tones.... ;)
Regards
Julian
--
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j u l i a n k n o w l e s
senior lecturer in music technology
electronic arts co-ordinator
school of contemporary arts (music), university of western sydney
web: http://www.geocities.com/socialinterior
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