Re: [microsound] Cutting edge???

["Bob L. Sturm" <sturm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Said:
> "progressive," and "cutting edge," oh and "revolutionary," are such buzz
> words. Western society is so consumed with forward thinking it gives me
> vertigo. My actions now will be justified by what happens in the
> future. I am part of a revolution. And other nonsense.

Aya Said:
""but what do you think of making musical genres/categories in general? is 
it useful, have we become overly fragmented and nit-picky about style?""

Distinctions are good, categories are bad. Making categories require 
decisions on how to classify things. How baroque is Bach? How classical is 
Beethoven--thus splitting Beethoven into two personalities, early and 
late. At what level to we begin classifying? Do we categorize an artist? 
Or just an album? Perhaps a single song? Maybe a moment in the song, the 
hook perhaps. It is good to ask what is music and what isn't music. It is 
stupid to ask what is alternative country, and what
isn't alternative country.

In fourier theory you make a tradeoff between precision in the time domain 
or in the frequency domain. This is also known in physics as Hiesenberg's 
uncertainty principle. I have to make a decision on whether I want better 
frequency resolution, or better component onset resolution. If I am 
analyzing the sound of the trumpet, looking at better frequency resolution 
removes the essential spectral envelopes which really make a trumpet sound 
like a trumpet (Jean-Claude Risset). This can be seen with smaller
windows, but then I trade off good frequency resolution.

The intensity of categorization is the same. Depending on my purposes I 
can say this is music and this isn't music. Or I can say this is Garth 
Brooks and this isn't Garth. In the first instance I can say something 
intelligent about Bach. In the latter I only look like an idiot. History 
is easy to categorize as long as you give up time resolution. In the 
philosophy of science it is easy to talk about the Copernican revolution; 
but it is impossible to point at a specific instant and say "This is when 
it happened." Answers to the question What started World War 1 are
similarly confused.

As it says in the forthcoming "Idiot's Guide to Microsound:"

  Microsound is marked by the cutting-edge use of computers, specifically 
  laptops, to create quiet microtonal environments of computerized sound. 
  This can be traced as far back as 1991 to Moby's revolutionary song 
  "Go," and some would say even further back to the avant-garde German 
  electroacoustic pioneers Kraftwerk.

----

Which is the lesser of the two evils?


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