old thread

[Julian Knowles <j.knowles@xxxxxxxxxx>]

"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
web: http://www.geocities.com/socialinterior