Re: xenakis quote source

["dp" <dp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> the quote (in a better context) is as follows: 
> 
> "It is not so much the inevitable use of mathematics that characterizes the
> attitude of these experiments, as the overriding need to consider sound and
> music as a vast potential reservoir in which a knowledge of the laws of
> thought and the structured creations of thought may find a completely new
> medium of materialization, i.e., of communication. 
> 
> For this purpose the qualification 'beautiful' or 'ugly' makes no sense for
> sound, nor for the music that derives from it; the quantity of intelligence
> carried by the sounds must be the true criterion of the validity of a
> particular music." 
> 
> 
> "Formalized Music" - Iannis Xenakis   Preface/pg ix 
> 
> 

i tend to think that this whole argument (which i do not know since
i haven't read "Formalized Music") should be somewhat transposed,
or at least the word "intelligence" be omitted. 

shannon's concept of information and channel capacity has an objective
set of parameters with which the source's and target's signals can
be confronted. 

in this frameset "beautiful", "ugly" or "intelligent" really have no
meaning. 

this i understand. 

how should everyone have the same criteria to determine the
"knowledge of the laws of thought and the structured creations of thought"
in order to decide if a sound is portraying "intelligence"
or whether it is "dumb"? 

isn't it like saying: here's a way to determine if this composer
is smart or not? the way s/he thinks. 

i don't believe that all artists are necessarily intelligent
(or intelligent in the same way). they might become important
in history because of different reasons. 

an impulse
(the same one people in the list have manipulated for the project)
can be seen (heard!) as a very stupid sound: tic. 

still, if you study it on a mathematical/phisical level,
it's very complex (i mean a theorical impulse, not a sampled one). 

is it intelligent or not? 

i could do a huge patch on max which is really very complicated
and takes me a whole bunch of time to finish, but
in the end the sounds it makes don't satisfy me. 

then i'd do a very straight forward, simple, fiddling-around, patch
with audiomulch and i find the sounds so beautiful (subjectively speaking)
that i'm happy for a month. 

...intelligence...? 

 

Xenakis was a smart guy (...not judging on the music alone...),
but i really don't get this. 

i'll go read and study, still i'll hope that subjective matters
will remain so, and math will keep on doing its job with a good
dose of influence, but without taking total control. 

cheers. 

 

 -l-@dp 

 

partial derivative of a point 

http://www.l-ll-l.org 

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