points & clicks

[david turgeon <dt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hope you don't mind my little diversion from your discussion, but this 
paragraph here touches upon a subject i was thinking of writing 
about...  all very abstract i'm afraid, but let's see how it fares here...

>By the way, there is one sense in which glitch is a culmination of
>musical modernism. Since Webern, much modernist musical production has
>been concerned with the atomization of musical material. This
>atomization continued with the serialist pointillism of the Koln and
>Darmstadt schools, in which the "point" replaced the line (melody) or
>even the "note" (as an element of melody) as the fundamental musical
>element. The arrival of the click may be the final destination of that
>trajectory of atomization.

is there really such a dramatic conceptual difference between the point & 
the click, though?

& is there even such a dramatic conceptual difference between the line & 
the point, to begin with?

at a first glance, all of the above are similar, but each of them represent 
a different scale.  they can be building blocks (points are assembled into 
a line, lines are assembled into a work), & they can be canvases: you can 
design a line out of points & you can design a point out of clicks, & you 
can design a click, just watch kim cascone...

but if you can design a click, what's its building block, a 'click of 
click'?  as a semantic experiment, i like to think of the click as the 
smallest measure, in the quantum mechanics sense of a measure below which 
nothing can be grasped or measured.  warning: this is only a conceptual 
analogy.  i am not saying that a click cannot be measured, but that 
anything smaller makes no practical sense by itself to the composer or 
listener.

the quantum analogy is useful, it seems, to talk of a scale (we'll continue 
using 'clicks' for the sake of this monologue) whose 'building blocks' are 
out of reach.  it has, in fact, no building blocks that we can discern.  & 
in practice, we can say this of most clicks: what sense would it make to 
hear an even smaller sound?  there is a degree of smallness beyond which 
all you hear is, in fact, a 'click sound', no matter what the originating 
segment sounded like.  (a bass drone?  a beat?  a voice?  if you take a 
fraction of a second of each, they will all sound more or less the same.)

what (in seconds?) is this smallest measure?  can it even be 
established?  i don't know--i'm only bringing a hypothesis.  why?  because 
i think it explains a lot of what 'microsound' brings to the technique & 
history of music: not so much the miniaturisation of music per se but a 
harnessing of THE smallest possible musical block of a given composition...

as you say, "The arrival of the click may be the final destination of that 
trajectory of atomization."

microsound composers recognise, i think, that if you can conceive of a line 
as a series of points, you cannot however conceive of a click as a series 
of 'parts of a click'.  to make a click, you must, in a certain way, 
'invoke' it, either by chopping down a larger portion of sound, or looking 
for a specific chance operation bringing you this smallest component.  out 
of these clicks larger structures may emerge; but it's impossible to make 
sense out of the inner structure of a click.  (you can make sense out of 
the microscopic wave form, but then, you are looking at an image, not 
hearing a sound.)

someone could argue that you can build a click out of mathematical formula, 
i.e. code, & thus code can be considered the true building block of a 
click.  but code merely simulates the extraction of a click out of a larger 
component.  the click is, for all practical purposes, 'extracted' from the 
code.

so if there's a fundamental difference between the point & the click, it's 
that the point has the possibility to be conceived as a suite of clicks, 
whereas the click could only be extracted from something larger (point, 
line, work).

& so there is no clear 'click +> point +> line +> work' hierarchy.  the 
click is flexible & can be directly related to any larger measure.  (eg. i 
usually throw a whole song into 2 granulators...  which effectively creates 
a long series of clicks re-creating something related to the original work 
but...  processed.  which yields this sort of compositional paradigm: point 
+> line +> work -> click +> work.)  ['+>' = assemblage, '->' = extraction]

the main problem with my argument is that for simplicity's sake it 
considers all music to be recorded, which is not the case.  it's hard to 
even envision what would 'click' mean in a context of live music, for 
example: should we make every fraction of a violin note a 'click'?  in 
which case, how is this so different from a point?  this is why i think the 
click only makes sense as a sample, an object that was generated indirectly 
by another, unrelated process, an essential musical building block.  a 
conceptual analogy would be the string of a violin...  (in that sense, 
whoever 'prepared' an instrument for the first time is the founding parent 
of microsound.)

"an' the 'tott' wouldnt be alone if i was wit' it--needa--eh?"  (krazy kat)

have a nice day
~ david

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