Re: [microsound] correspondence between hand-made electronics and Pd/Max/MSP (was Socio/political implications of microsound music?)

[Exegene <exegene@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2 Jul 2006, nick knouf wrote:
*snip*
> Rather, I'm more interested in what I see as possibilities for serendipitous 
> discoveries that come with long-term involvement with a physical system 
> (i.e., acoustic instruments, bought as well as hand-made electronics) that I 
> feel is somewhat absent from the enforced exactitude that is inherent in a 
> digital system.
*snip*

Software and programming languages are formalized relations, so computer 
music at the composition on the screen stage is, being expressed in terms 
of software and programming languages, also formalized relations, that is 
math, with probably some arbitrary adulteration mucking up the pool. As 
such some kinds of computer music are as limited in their expressivity and 
musical-ness as is the composer in hir fluency in the appropriate 
mathematics. Consider the common experience of moving from a palette 
limited to pre-composed instruments not much more complicated than
"Pitch source => 2 Oscillators, detuned => Filter => Amplifier => Output"
to comparative fluency in a language that allows the consideration and use 
of sufficiently rich timbres, meaningful control schemes, etc., probably 
through years of painful study and yet more painful recordings. It's 
through the experience and maturation of much intimacy that one arrives at 
satisfactory music.

There are idiosyncrasies and points of familiarity to be found in computer 
instruments just as in meatspace's. A composer's tendency to conceive 
musical problems in certain ways translates into hir common use of certain 
typical structures, and each environment has its own standard ways of 
expressing typical structures. Consider the familiarity some composers 
have with certain non-obvious algorithmic methods of control signal 
generation, or the necessity to consider in certain environments whether a 
trigger is positive-going or negative-going. This speaks nothing of the 
use of controllers more interesting than keyboard and mouse.

Computer music, too, is extremely limited, not least by the composer's 
critical faculties, requiring that out bridges be jumped and raging 
torrents forded.

The familiarity with interrelations to be had through man(ual)ipulation of 
everyday objects is a naturally arising faculty, but so too seems to be 
the familiarity with interrelations of abstract objects to be had through 
psychic exercise. More necessary to development of the faculty is the 
gained familiarity of repetition, consideration, and experimentation than is 
that the faculty relates to objects more or less in the realm of hands and 
fingers.

--
Dear Patron Saint,
your lips are lopsided
www.devo.com/exegene

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