Re: dumb sources - smart music

["dp" <dp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> on 9/1/03 12:38 PM, microsound-digest-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: 
> 
> i've heard nurse with wound do the most amazing things out of
> the most "dumb" sources. 
> 
> % I've known Steven for many years and he piles A LOT of intelligent sources
> into his work: literature, painting, surrealism, dada...its all in there if
> you can recognize it... 
> 

aw...c'mon. 

i'm sure about that: you can hear it perfectly.
i really like most of the stuff he does.
that's part of personal culture, and i believe he has an awful lot
of that. 

please, don't get me wrong. 

 

and the shannon thing: what i was trying to say is that in a way
music (audio) can be seen as data transfer (not objective data, for sure)
but that you cannot apply a rigid mathematical scheme to it,
like shannon's model. 

so when someone is talking about intelligence, i keep on not agreeing.
or not seeing what "intelligence" means. 

and, as i said, you (or Stapleton or whoever) can start from what
might be defined as an "unintelligent" source and work on it
so that in the end you get an unexpected and fascinating result.
is that intelligent? 

certainly it has to do with personal culture, and the way others
perceive it has to do with their own, but in the end i cannot
see how, out of pure rationalism, one can establish the amount of
intelligence of a sound. 

Cage used to love refrigerators' sounds. i personally don't,
especially during the night, but isn't that all have to do with
differences between us and our personal histories/cultures? 

as i said in one of my first mails: i don't understand how
to relate to this Xenakis' quote; i can understand a mathematical model
(such as shannon's) [meaning: i can understand it in its context, not
talking about music, clear?] but i don't see how objective parameters
of value or of worthiness can be put on sounds. 

hope it's enough. 

night. 

 

 -l-@dp 

 

partial derivative of a point 

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

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