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

[Damian Stewart <damian@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

--
Damian Stewart
+64 27 305 4107

f r e y
live music with machines
http://www.frey.co.nz
http://www.myspace.com/freyed

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