Re: [microsound] levels of abstraction

[Elisha <guitarristo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

that's great.  what's it sound like?  Why do you do it?

elisha

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---- On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Phil Berdecio (pberdecio@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> 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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