Re: [microsound] AI & rhythm perception - 'groove' heuristics?

[michael trommer <trommer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting that you'd mention the mpc...The whole mpc 'groove' factor is
one that has driven tech boffins to the point of insanity...does it have an
actual built-in grooviness that other drum machines/samplers lack ? Go to
http://www.mpc-forums.com for the hilarity.

I still think that an intellectual analysis of something that is so
obviously based on pure feeling is missing the point...dancing about
architecture and yadayada...

Good luck, though. 

On 11/21/06 12:22 AM, "Damian Stewart" <damian@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> michael trommer wrote:
>> This is one of the most anti-groovy things I've ever read.
> 
> Why so?
> 
> I've developed this idea through extended listening to a local group called
> Fat Freddy's Drop, who consist of a DJ playing an Akai MPC2000, a vocalist,
> and between three and ten jamming musicians on guitar, horns, keys, etc.
> They play a kind of music best described as a cross between dub/reggae and
> hip-hop, and are almost universally considered to be both remarkably
> 'funky' and deeply 'organic'. The interesting thing about their music is
> that the MPC plays /all/ of the drums/percussion and /all/ of the bass;
> what's more in live gigs the music is sparse so that a lot of the time the
> act involves the MPC doing its thing while the rest of the band sway around
> on stage in front of their mics not actually making any noise. All the
> while there's a huge crowd out the front dancing the way a crowd would
> normally dance to big slow dub jams.
> 
> It all rests on the skill of the MPC programmer, of course; but before
> anyone starts waving their arms around about the mythical swing of the MPC,
> most often soid swing function is off, and the beats lie on a rigid metric
> grid either divides in duplets or in triplets. Here you've got a metrically
> precise, temporally static machine-generated groove that is both 'organic'
> and 'funky' in pretty much all of the ways that matter.
> 
> What's more the beats have a particularly polished and complete feel to
> them, as though they exist in some state of minimal near-perfection. The DJ
> doesn't really give interviews but the he comes across (through local
> stories) as a perfectionist, always trying to strip things back to the most
> minimal, the simplest and best way to articulate a groove. I don't know
> about you but this sounds very much to me like the kind of language any
> mathematician with a reasonably developed sense of aesthetics might use in
> pruning an algorithm... especially when you couple that with the kind of
> mathematics-based perfect repeatibility that digital tools like the MPC offer.



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