[microsound] digital folk music --was Re: barcode MIDI

[derek holzer <derek@xxxxxxx>]

tobias c. van Veen wrote:
[snip]
> I think Ableton should be given credit
> for simplifying the performativity of electronic music and turning the
> laptop from complex code machine to an instrument.

Yes, I think we should give Abelton credit for creating the most
successful digital folk music instrument yet. Like the modtrackers
of old, Live allows any old Neanderthal to throw a pile of samples
together and come out with something that sounds just like what the
software was programmed to create: German techno. Perhaps we should 
cease calling Live a musical instrument, and start to recognize it 
alongside Flash and AfterEffects as one of the greatest collaborative 
artworks of the computer age, written by software artist Robert Henke so 
that everyone can make Monolake tracks in the privacy of their own 
bedroom! [   ;-)   ]

In this sense, Live and modtrackers alike are just the software 
incarnations of bagpipes, accordians and marimbas. Instruments crafted 
to make the folk music of their day. Sure, there are vituoso 
folk-software performers [Richard Chartier uses Live... to my suprise!], 
but it is predominantly lumpen, rank-and-file music made according the 
the strict limitations and rigid structure imposed by the 
folk-software-instrument. The kind of sounds which people are proud to 
have made [I fondly recall the beaming smiles of Romanian gypsies 
playing their violins at a village wedding I visited in Transylvania], 
but which don't really deserve any recognition outside of their 
immediate context simply because there are virtually indistinguishable 
from any other instance of the same folk-tradition. In short, the 
bedroom DJ is the new bagpiper.

[For more on "digital folk art", I refer you to Pit Schultz's excellent
essay in the Read_Me 2003 software art festival reader. See also 
Signwave's "AutoIllustrator", a vector graphics program where the GUI 
does all the work--with a mind of its own! Or catch Walter Benjamin's 
tongue firmly planted in Tim Hecker's cheek when he titles a track "The 
Work of Art in the Age of Cultural Overproduction"...]

....and speaking of violins, I's also like see this idea that the
computer musician need not understand computers to make music stricken
from the record. It's obviously a mistake in terminology. *Software*
musicians don't need to understand how the computer works, so long as
they've read their manual and know how to diddle around with other
people's knobs and presets. But when I think of *computer* musicians, I
think of people like Curtis Roads, and his first granulation programs
which he had to punch on paper cards and fed into the machine manually.
Because there was no other way to make that kind of sound, he had to
invent it. And to do that, he needed to understand his chosen 
instrument, the computer, and how to make music with it. Hardly the kind 
of GUI-enabled digi.folkisms we are accustomed to now...

cheers,
d.

--
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 79:
"Go slowly all the way round the outside"


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