I think it was Godel who for Einstein's 70's birthday proved that
time (in the natural world, physics-sense) could be cyclical.
That aside, thinking of music, time is universal in that there is an
underlying flow of time (kept by a conductor, or reinforced by a
group of musicians) but different rhythms of time for different parts
of the music, such as 4/4 time for the bassoons but 7/8 time for the
clarinets.
A big issue with functions calling themselves is that this is not how
we keep track of time conceptually - the next beat in a song is not
always 200ms in the future, because we having a running notion of
when that beat should have been based on the last pattern of beats,
and this particular beat may have been early or late, so the next
beat (or event) may need to be more than / less than 200ms
in the future.
I suppose its not really "time" but "rhythm" that I am interested in
with any sort of performance, and rhythm is recursive and could exist
separately for a number of different processes / events / objects /
etc. Time is the river flowing and the "events" are the boats and
bridges and seagulls that cross it. Its interesting to watch the
flow of the river going by, but our eyes and mind are drawn to the
objects floating on it. Or, as Miles Davis would say (if he was for
some reason on a livecoding list discussing the nature of time), the
spacing between them.
-Evan
On Sep 25, 2009, at 10:29 AM, alex wrote:
> Another thought, with the Clayton Time in Indian Music book in mind,
> another time distinction is linear/cyclic. Whether you are making
> music that starts and tries to find an end, or music that goes in
> cycles, and ends where it begins. I'd say my current system is
> cyclic, although the music I make is composed of cycles but the
> overall time structure of a session often isn't one big cycle but
> rather linear.
>
> alex
>
> --
> http://yaxu.org/
Evan Raskob
ML Studio
4-8 Arcola Street
London E8 2DJ
United Kingdom
http://mlstudio.co.uk
http://pixelist.info
Received on Fri Sep 25 2009 - 10:52:33 BST