>> One suspicion might be that the 'note-level' instrumental musician is
>> more able to attend to individual notes than the 'sequence-level' live
>> coder. But I suspect this would be too much of crude separation, and we
>> can attend to different time slices as we go.
>
> I don't think any improvising musician is 'note-level'.
Not do I- music works on multiple interacting timescales. I just said that
one suspicion might be that the instrumental musician is more able to
attend to individual notes, whilst a live coder dips into more statistical
aggregates of activity without following the note by note progression.
Of course, musicians can't always follow every note anyway- but I'll avoid
the digression into psychological timescales and the transcription problem.
I subscribe to
> Jeff Pressing's model of the role of an improvising musician being in
> making changes to what they're playing. A trained improviser's body
> plays notes automatically according to some scheme, the music is in
> introducing deviations from that scheme, and thematic changes into new
> schemes.
I'm sorry I didn't comment on Jeff's model before when you brought it up
some months back. I'm still waiting to be allowed to put my PhD online, and
I say a few more things about it there, but whilst I respect Jeff's work
very much (and he was a very learned researcher) this particular ostensibly
reasonable mathematical model needs a lot more work, and a lot more
evidence/experimental corroboration, to allow it to be applied in any
specific situation.
>> we confessed that live coding is conductor
>> level and fundamentally different to gestural musicianship.
>
> I disagree. Improvisers encode gestures through practise, we encode
> gestures through programming. Combining those gestures is what we can
> do 'on stage'.
Note sure we are disagreeing, and I might pull back before getting into all
sorts of different gestures. I'm pretty certain, however, that the physical
scheduling mechanisms are different - witness the reaction times. And live
coding in the sense I usually mean it (which may be different to what you
intend) is much more Wanderley and Orio (2002)'s score level than note
level.
> Isn't programming all about encapsulation?
Sorry, I used encapsulate as a pun then. I do assume there are cerebral
methods to hold certain algorithmic gestures, which doesn't mean these
algorithms can be spilled out at note speed unless you precoded them.
I guess its interesting to imagine a live coding mental million armed
octopus, holding a maze and mire of algorithms in its repertoire, waiting
to fire them off in response to the slightest and quickest of provocations.
But this would really be like an interactive music system, even where human
guided, rather than live coding in my favoured sense, which involves
fundamental rewrite engagement with algorithms on-the-fly.
but I'll stop wittering on too much, very interesting seeing everyone's
comments today!
best
N
Received on Wed Jan 10 2007 - 15:13:09 GMT