RE: [microsound] state of beauty

[Noel Peters <npeters@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think Curtis Roads covers this subject well in Chapter 8 of his text
Microsounds
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: david golightly [mailto:davigoli@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, 30 November 2004 3:46 AM
To: microsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [microsound] state of beauty

fly-on-the-wall, myself, but this has been a fascinating discussion and
I'd 
like to add a few musings of my own...

I can understand both sides of this debate, and I think they both have 
something to them -- in effect this is a reworking of the "style vs. 
structure" debate you inevitably get subjected to when you hang around 
music-creator-composer types - and I think just as there are many people
on 
this list who gravitate toward more beat-driven "dj" music (as it were),
as 
well as many (like myself) who find themselves in a more avant-garde
vein 
and veer away from "danceability" (not discounting of course all who go 
between), people come from different places in their drive to create
music.

So perhaps in the "big picture" it's about separating the biological
from 
the cultural, i.e. what are people predisposed to "like" in sound 
(biologically), and what sounds are they likely to make (as music), and
for 
what purpose (culturally)?  and there isn't a clean line between the
two.

and a case can be made about diatonality, or pentatonality, and perhaps
a 
four-count as well, and fundamental, rudamentary harmonic relationships
(!= 
western harmonic progression) such as the p-4th and pythagorean
identities 
which occur in some form on various scales throughout all cultures as a 
result of biological fact about humans (whose ears evolved to listen to 
voice, not music) and also the physics of sound being as they are - that
for 
all the babbling brooks and rainstorms and natural sources of
noisemakers in 
nature, the basic instruments people pick up and make generally involve 
resonance of some kind, whether a string or a tube or a drum.  and 
universality is very fascinating because it reminds us of what we all
have 
in common etc. etc.

and yet for all of this universality it gets real messy when looked at
from 
any perspective useful for creation of music.  because people aren't
blank 
slates.  because on the scale of a "musical macro-event" (i.e. piece or 
song) you're not starting from scratch,

and for its digital connotations "re-mix" really isn't a post-digital 
concept - throughout history whenever cultures bumped into each other
there 
were re-mixes: little snippets of Arab tunes that were heard and
Europe-ized 
into minuets.  folk songs heard and turned into symphonies, or adopted
and 
modified to fit another culture altogether, or symphonic tunes that had 
words put to them and turned into pop songs.  tunes got recycled and
used in 
various forms for various occasions and arrangements (the l'homme arme' 
mass, for instance), it's just that with this proliferation of
technology 
things move around faster and faster, and things get messier as they get

re-cycled before they're even really digested/assimilated.

perhaps it is here where the ability to distinguish between styles
becomes 
as irrelevant as knowing that single-period waveform I granulated was
taken 
from britney spears and not from mozart or shakuhachi flute, because
there 
is no intellectual copyright on style.  Can you quantify your
influences?  
How many fingers would it take to count them?  Is that little 1-bar drum

African, Malaysian, Peruvian?  How can you tell (and what does cultural 
origin matter) once you've taken it out of context?

sorry to subject you all to such a poorly organized post, I'll try and
keep 
it down next time 'round.

thx
david



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