Michal;
But I guess any composer who starts playing around with
> computers brings in his cultural baggage so that should at least
> explain why such and such practice employs such and such music forms.
>
>
And not only that; the systems that we use are themselves influenced by the
culture they arose from and the ideas of their designer(s). This too may
influence the choices made. I'm not just talking about convenience functions
like one for converting MIDI note numbers to frequencies that assume the
modern western tuning here. I also think that perspectives on syntax may
affect matters. The old fashioned GOTO is a lot like the instructions in
some written scores while a "while" loop is more like the sort of repetition
we see in a program like Live (at least to me).
While ChucK is based on Java-style syntax and that fully explains why it has
a "while" and no "GOTO" we may also wonder whether assumptions about musical
usage may not have played a role there as well. ChucK for example has a
"repeat"
//like this
repeat(3) <<<"this will be printed three times">>>;
...that I don't believe exists in Java.
I would therefore predict that SC and CK -based pieces would be more "loopy"
than CSound ones. Images generated in Fluxus or Impromptu would likely tend
to be more alike each other than like ones generated in Processing, I would
predict as Impromptu and Fluxus are more alike syntactically.
I think it would be dangerous to assume that the systems that we use aren't
every bit as influenced by their designer's ideas on music as Live is
influenced by Henke's background in Berlin techno. This is not meant as
criticism; our cultural background makes us the people that we are which is
(mostly) a great thing.
New research suggestion; a series of interviews with designers of
music-coding systems about their own musical tastes and background. We can
also interview the designers of graphics-coding systems about their taste in
design and visual art. We might then try to test whether similarities in
taste there would be a good predictor for affinity with the syntax of the
system in question.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Thu Nov 26 2009 - 18:21:49 GMT