Re: [microsound] usefulness of compressors/mastering in experimental music

[derek holzer <derek@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Alex,

and thanks for your insight on this, especially from someone who comes 
form the programming side of sound.

Alex Young wrote:

> Don't you find it just as interesting when musicians use software in 
> original ways that it wasn't intended? 

Absolutely. I love suprises! But I can almost guarentee that those 
people who can hack the pretty-looking commerical stuff and make it jump 
through hoops of fire have a knowledge of their computers as 
sound-and-data-processing instruments that the lazy GUI-addict simply 
doesn't. Their creative process with these applications doesn't depend 
on their skill in using limited possibilities given by the programmers, 
but on their skill in manipulating the computer itself.

Take Woody and Steina Vasulka, who pretty much invented everything that 
VJs take for granted now--the direct interaction of audio and video 
signals. They started by hacking the tools of analog music synthesis and 
running video signals through it because the tools for what they wanted 
to make didn't exist. But this took a level of familiarity with the 
technology, and not just blind luck pushing buttons.


> I've seen umpteen Pd/Supercollider/Max-based laptop 
> performances with no thoughts beyond 'making cool sounds' which somewhat 
> disillusioned me with the whole affair.

Yes, of course. And how many technical sacks-of-tricks from the "demo 
scene" were interesting beyond the fact that the dude could hurl ten 
thousand spinning cubes a second out of the screen, and he wrote it in 
Assembler? ;-) I am aware of the dangers of becoming programming-centric 
in the approach to art. I just came back from a conference on open 
source video applications where these dangers were well displayed. You 
had very good programmers demoing their stuff, but what you saw was a 
hodge-podge mess of video clips being run through every filter they had 
ever designed, one after the other. In this case, the art on display was 
the code itself--and code worthy of the name "art" it was. The video on 
the screen, however, was simply one instance of that code at work [like 
a lot of Live or Reason tracks...]

> I'm aware that it's all too often that people use software like Reason 
> and Acid to make incredibly dull dance music.  I just think it's 
> dangerous to judge artistic credibility that way.

The fact that one has programmed an application one's self doesn't give 
it automatic artistic credibility, and I'm not necessarily judging 
credibility on these grounds. But I am making some distinctions between 
using the computer itself as a creative tool versus using one or the 
other piece of software as a creative tool.

One approach is very limited in its scope and tends towards the 
production of default results, i.e. what the software was intended to 
make. I've referred to this elsewhere as "digital folk music", and I'll 
stick by my guns on that one.

The other approach can also, necessarily, produce "bad art" or "bad 
music". But I am interested just as much in the process of how art is 
created as in the end result, or "instance", of that process. It is 
necessary to the context and the enjoyment for me.

There are others on this list and around the world that just want to 
listen to something "that rocks", and that's fine. Personally, learning 
even the most basic things about how computers actually work had a huge 
effect on my work in the best possible ways. But it took time. And when 
I just want "results", and I've gone as far as I am interested in my own 
process of crafting sounds, you might catch me twiddling the odd plugin 
late at night. But hey, I didn't write my own multitracker either! ;-)

best,
d.


--
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 51:
"Distorting time"

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