Re: [microsound] physical filter

[ross birdwise <rbirdwise@xxxxxxxxx>]

I realize that I'm a little behind in the discussion
but I have some thoughts:

"Who's trying to remove the body?  We're trying to
remove aural limits 
to perception of new aural concepts and the limits
that the body imposes 
to the delivery of such concepts.  It's not the body
that's the 
problem; it's the container--the one that said that if
you couldn't "play" 
conventionally, you had nothing whatsoever to say."

I think that the computer has a different set of
limits because it requires a set of non-physical
mental skills (ex.  creating a new sound with MAX/MSP,
creating a complicated patch with MAX/MSP, perhaps the
design of new software)and I do agree that it allows
non-physically proficient individuals to enter into
the realm of music.  This is probably the reason why
some people say 'this isn't music' when listening to
contemporary laptop composition, especially those
compositions that make the medium  seem opaque.

--- Bill Ashline <billashline@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Kenric McDowell <kenricm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> >Thanks for clearing that up. I get it now: The
> precise execution of 
> >musical ideas without dramatic presentation fails
> to meet the 
> >expectations of an audience accustomed to
> theatricality.
> 
> That's part of it, Kenric.  The other part has to do
> with the relationship between one's ideas and one's
> tools.
> 
> >
> >My contention is that the physical relationship to
> an instrument is not 
> >completely motivated by theatricality and that it
> does in fact have a 
> >lot to do with the creation of sonic concepts.
> These are two assumptions 
> >that deprive us of an area of potential thought and
> exploration in music 
> >making.
> 
> The issue had to do with proficient motor skills. 
> Certainly one needs motor skills to use a computer. 
> That's obvious.  But when it comes to making music a
> computer allows a more "immediate" relation to the
> ideas.  Until the computer came around, the only
> thing that approximated such a concept would have
> been the analogue experiments in electronic music
> that came earlier.  Before both of these things, if
> you could not play a musical instrument with some
> facility, you had, ipso facto, no musically
> productive life.  And if you could play with some
> facility, your concepts were always mediated by the
> sound of your instrument of proficiency.
> 
> 
> >The presumed removal of the body from the process
> of creation is in 
> >itself a filter.
> 
> Who's trying to remove the body?  We're trying to
> remove aural limits to perception of new aural
> concepts and the limits that the body imposes to the
> delivery of such concepts.  It's not the body that's
> the problem; it's the container--the one that said
> that if you couldn't "play" conventionally, you had
> nothing whatsoever to say.
> -- 
> His face is turned towards the past.  Where we
> preceive a chain of events, he sees one single
> catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
> wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.  The
> angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
> whole what has been smashed.  But a storm is blowing
> from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with
> such violence that the angel can no longer close
> them.  This storm irresistibly propels him into the
> future to which his back is turned, while the pile
> of debris before him grows skyward.  This storm is
> what we call progress.
> --Walter Benjamin on the Angel of History
> 
> You can always rely on America to do the right
> thing, once it has exhausted the alternatives.
> --Winston Churchill
> 
> 
>
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