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"pelagius pelagius" <pela_gius@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

No, I'm saying that all of these different tools sound very different. Including max/msp. Yes it is flexible and in theory you can do "anything"
with it. But in reality software synths do have a certain "sound" to them
just like any other musical tool.

i agree to a point... ie the concept that a particular plug-in or softsynth has a quality - but the characters and colours of the components do not necessarliy create the character and quality of the music. We were discussing an environment where one can freely build these configurations and route them in highly complex ways, ie you could put a signal through six different filters in line so you were hearing a complex interaction of the components which did not, in the end, sound like any of the individual filters (eg northpole, or grm bandpass, or an msp bandpass etc..) All instruments have qualities and colours, and i am in complete agreement with you on that - but the combinations, juxtapositions and the way someone handles the environment determine the sound world.. if you are listening to the sound of one filter in a mix and trainspotting it, then perhaps the music is not working very well. i still maintain that this is an issue relating to composition and not a specifically digital or software based thing - the same principle applies to all forms of music making, regardless of the resources employed.



  I never said that everything created in
max/msp sounds the same nor am I diminishing the decisions made by the
artist as you claim.


ok then we're in agreement!


 I just take issue with the implication that digital
tools have no inherent "sound" of their own but are some sort of pure
digital canvas.

I agree to a point, and i don't believe anything is 'pure' or 'without colour' in a theoretical sense, but digital can be pretty transparent if you want it to be. Not many of the people on this list would probably be after that, but it certainly can be used in that fashion. Take a field recording with great microphones recorded at 24 bit, transfer it digitally to a workstation and make a piece with nothing but minor edits, layering and some subtle eq and see if you could tell it from a recording made to a stereo nagra where the piece was compiled on a high end multitrack at 30ips and dolby SR and mixed through a high end console. You would probably find it impossible to tell the difference, unless you were a professional mastering engineer with a set of extremely expensive monitors in a quiet room.


What i'm discussing here are analog and digital processes which avoid the obvious artefacts and colourations of the media in question. As a contrast you could imagine the same recording made with via sending too hot a signal to a powerbook built in sound input recorded in 8 bit/11khz and/or a cheap dictaphone, both of which would foreground the artefacts of the media.

Also, i'd hate to think that an instrument had such a limited palette of sounds that it was always able to be identified. i find that even if an instrument has a very strong character and very tight constraints, there are still very uncharacteristic sounds to be found if you dig for them, or if you process the signals in personal ways.

a friend of mine, phill niblock, composes music with tones made from acoustic instruments. He plays a laptop. There is nothing about his music which says 'digital' or makes reference to any software. No one would listen to his work and go, 'laptop' or 'max/msp' or 'audiomulch' or 'grm' or [insert favourite trainspot]. the laptop is a convenience - he can store lots of sounds in it and detune stuff live to get the desired sum and difference tones in the venue he's in. The sounds are only minutely altered. This of course poses a stark contrast to someone like Hecker... or the like, but the instrument, the software etc.. have significant intersections and the musics are as sonically remote as they could possibly be.

You probably think i am being overly pedantic or argumentative - and i apologise if i am coming over that way, but i think there is an important point here which does not often get represented in the 'laptop music [or whatever] all has the same/similar quality' argument. There are many more dimensions to this than are apparent at first glance.



At 5:39 AM +0000 1/2/02, stephan mathieu <sssst@xxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:

oren ambarchi works with a couple of rusty analogue devices and a lot of =
people might swear he owns the hottest laptop around running the tool of the =
week.

haha, yes true... there are some tracks on oren's first touch album that sound like 50s stockhausen. If he wasn't already advertised as a guitarist, i think many would be surprised at the source of the sounds. that said, oren has a blue and white g3 at home which he constantly ringing me about with questions... <g> but as for live, its strictly pedals, a moogerfooger ringmod (the real box) being the latest addition, and the famous sawn off guitar from phlegm with an extra pickup added over the nut/first fret. His latest minimal harmonic stuff sounds just like a fender rhodes - uncanny and very beautiful... This is 'sound mining' at its best.


anyway, apologies for the verbose post..

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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
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