RE: [microsound] Lemur!

[Noel Peters <npeters@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This view always seems to me to be a view that subscribes to two camps:
the "standing on the shoulders of giants" camp and the craft adds value
to the art camp.

Instruments comprise of an oscillator and a resonator. Acoustic
instruments are limited by the physical bounds of what can be
constructed, suffer from appalling ergonomics and demand the onerous
learning of manual technique. Some people with particularly shaped hands
and bodies are either fortunate or disadvantaged. These limitations seem
to me to be boundaries that instrument designers would rather overcome.

They also seem to be boundaries that some people embrace as noble
aesthetic parameters prescribed by some higher order. I can't help
seeing this perspective as arch-conservative and fundamentality limiting
to progression. Perhaps some people prefer to look backwards.



 Noel Peters

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Carver [mailto:fscthaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, 11 February 2005 8:11 AM
To: microsound
Subject: Re: [microsound] Lemur!

Aside from the lesser level of physical minutiae involved in the act of 
pushing buttons/twiddling knobs, it seems important that virtuosity on 
a violin is also the result of hundreds of years of technique, 
training, and experimentation... when you listen to the playing of a 
violin, you're engaging with that history as much as you're engaging 
with the physical process of playing. This is something that simply 
doesn't exist for Lemur-type instruments, synthesizers, etc., at this 
point in time.

- Scott Carver

On Feb 10, 2005, at 11:37 AM, Frank D'Urso wrote:

> Oh dear God I hope you're kidding, but if you're not, that's a jaw 
> dropping statement. I don't see how anyone can consider themselves a 
> musician or even a lover of music without being awed at a display of 
> mastery over a physical instrument. The amount of minute motor control

> honed over decades, synapses working in perfect harmony with 
> appendages, the mind performing astronomical calculations on the fly 
> in order to make horse hair dragging over cat gut sound beautiful? 
> It's one of the greatest heights to which a human can aspire. I'm 
> sorry, but it doesn't take a tenth the skill to twiddle knobs (even if

> you built the box and wrote the software) that it does to master a 
> "dead-ended physical instrument". kp
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ha, in my first real band I often would get into this argument with 
> our ham fisted guitar player, he likened my magnus air organ to 
> "pushing buttons"
>
> This is my first post here, I'm Frank D'Urso of Roman the Edge from 
> Boston.  Interesting discussions, I like it here.
>
> Frank "RtE" D'Urso
>
>
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