levels of abstraction

[Phil Berdecio <pberdecio@xxxxxxxxx>]

hello- 

This is my first post, and the first topic that, due
to its fairly subjective nature, I feel confident to
comment on at this early point in my use of digital
audio. 
  I tend to think of sound in visual terms, usually
imagining a space in which the various sounds are
projected or simply manifest themselves. Event density
and relations of discrete sounds are common rough
parameters that determine my perception of where a
piece is going and where I'd like to take it. I often
imagine dense flows of sound as having internal
relationships that are consistent within the
particular cluster or stream of sound independent of
the stream's overall relationship to other elements in
the piece. I work mostly in Audiomulch (never even
seen Max/MSP), and after some initial confusion, I
think it's turning out to be a good interface for
translating my personal conceptions of sound into
pieces that more or less match up with what I had in
mind. It's especially good for stuff that moves
between metered rhythm and abstract "free form"
segments (although I tend to stick to one or the other
most often, from piece to  piece).
     So, no, I don't think in terms of numbers,
algorithms (sp?), etc. Stuff like that makes my eyes
glaze over. My musical background in psych-noise
guitar and house/techno djing, which are both skills
acquired with hands-on learning, so I have no formal
music training or background in music theory and
notation. My approach to sound seems to be best
attributed to my work as a visual artist, and my
life-long love of abstract painting. 
    I hope this was relevant. I'm sure at some point
I'll be able to more precisely verbalize thought
processes that seem so intrinsic to my personal
creative processes that I've hardly taken the time to
examine them "externally".

--Phil B

hello all -

i'm curious about the levels or forms of abstraction
that people in 
this
list use when working with sound.

.. generally, when i work with sound on a computer, i'm
thinking of the sound in terms or an array of numbers,
and i'm thinking of filtering in terms of mathematical
operations on a series of numbers, 
and synthesis as a means of genereating series of
numbers. i imagine that this attitude stems from the
tools i've used - snd/scheme and matlab in particular
- but even when i'm using software that completely
hides that notion of digitial audio as a series of
numbers, i still often have 
this
in mind.

a second level of abstraction that i often use is the
spectrum/fourier
transform. i think about the distributions of
different frequencies,
harmonic stacks, etc. this is also a somewhat
mathematical approach, 
but
it jumps a step away from a single series of numbers
and becomes, 
through
the fourier transform, a set of intensities at
different frequencies 
which
are summed together.

so - if any of you happen to relate to this question
at all - what are
you thinking about when you deal with sound? i imagine
there are 
endless
possibilities here which are likely constrained to
some extent by the
tools used.

i think the approach i described stands in start
contrast to the
traditional units of abstraction in western music -
note, pitch, 
loudness,
timbre, harmony - and certainly the two have a
relation to one another,
but generally i'm simply not thinking about notes, but
rather signals.

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