On 14/01/2013 3:23 AM, alex wrote:
> On 13 January 2013 16:02, Ross Bencina <rossb-lists_at_audiomulch.com> wrote:
>> You've really lost me here. I *don't* think of traditional scores as music.
>
> I don't either, and I'm not at all interested in traditional musical
> scores, but I can believe that others experience them as music, just
> as people experience books as stories. Before scores, people 'sung'
> the notation to each other (and still do with Canntaireachd and Bol
> syllables), and this very much gets wrapped up with the music itself.
>
> If the gap between incomplete notation and performance is significant,
> then do you think of mp3 files as music?
No I do not think of any representation or storage medium (or transport
medium) as music. Although some may interact with music more than others
-- coding, scores, the recording medium, and guitars all modulate the
music to some degree.
> If so, why not code, which
> also expresses the complete sonic output to the speakers?
There are two alternative (and somewhat contradictory) ways I think
about this:
1. Music exists in a platonic realm outside any representation or
playback. This is what I think of "composed music" -- it is a model.
Perhaps a model of (2) below.
2. Music is experiential. Music doesn't exist in the vibration of the
air it exists as a resonance in the animal that senses the vibrating
air. Music exists as the unfolding reactions of electrical and chemical
processes in the nervous system of the recipient, and as our experience
of these processes.
>> Scores are a notation to direct the performance of an act that (at its best)
>> renders music.
>
> Then it seems strange that the notation can exist before the music is
> performed, but is not deemed to be part of it.
Is a telephone part of a phone conversation?
Note that I said "rendered" implying that the music pre-exists the
notation (see 1. above).
If you view the notation as a transmission channel then it is reasonable
to conclude that the music exists prior to being transmitted on the
channel. It is also reasonable to exclude the channel from the
definition of music.
> In the case of live
> coding, the 'score' is constructed while the music is performed.
This seems like a contrivance. There is no score. Why involve the
"score" concept in the act of live coding?
>> The fact that traditional scores have come to be seen as music is one of the
>> great tragedies of the western tradition. Scores were created as an aid to
>> memory. Via a historical process some came to associate music with the
>> score.. but there is no more music in the score than there is poetry in a
>> book.
>
> Then it seems I don't understand poetry or musical scores, which I can
> quite believe having made neither..
I can not claim to know anything about poetry, aside from having heard
it recited a few times, read a little, and experienced it as something
not on the page but in the abstract space of language and meaning
(Cage's mesostic texts for example, provide a counter example in which
the page *is* important).
As I write this email, the ideas are forming separate from the text on
the screen -- the email stream is epiphenomenal to the conversation. The
conversation, while in some way structured by the nature of email, is
not really synonymous with the email.
The letters are not the correspondence.
>> Of course this poses a massive problem for generative theories. Since if the
>> score is not the music, the best that can be hoped for is a generative
>> theory of scores, not of music.
>
> I think the idea is to first model scores, and then performance of it
> separately.
Given that I don't believe that scores are music, I think it is more
interesting to model music than to model score and performance. This
does pose deeper problems of course. But this is the nature of
composition -- to invent a musical language, and to express it.
There is a long history of composition's engagement with mathematical
structures. I'm thinking of Guillaume de Machaut's use of isorhythm as a
crude example, but the whole of western music theory is full of the
stuff. So there is no surprise that programming data structures provide
a reasonable basis for structuring musical compositions.
Interestingly, I just read Machaut's approach described as "Gothic
Rationalism". I see the use of generative methods in computer music in a
similar light.
> It is interesting though to be a computer musician, embracing the use
> of computer language in music making, while rejecting wholly symbolic
> representations of music. I'm think I'm with you there!
I think it is difficult to get away from symbolic representations if you
work with formal logic. In fact it is this problem that keeps me working
at the level of sound synthesis and improvised control for my musical
activities.
In addition to symbolic, we can also think about discrete vs. continuous
representations and processes and all the ambiguities of perception.
>> That's interesting. Entraining with programmers via music. I wonder what
>> other examples of inter-activity entrainment exist?
>
> Hmm..
>
>> It's pretty hard to write code while dancing too... maybe not impossible
>> though.
>
> Yes.. Recently I've seen a couple of videos of myself live coding
> with people dancing, or artist carrying out live art actions, and I
> look completely still and inert. At least the projected screen shows
> *some* movement.
>
> alex
>
Received on Sun Jan 13 2013 - 17:21:37 GMT