On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 14:42 +0000, Nick Collins wrote:
> 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'. 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.
> Yet, we've all felt those moments where programming/thinking takes over
> entirely and the background music we had on is lost, only to reappear
> halfway through the next track
Or suddenly realise the album finished some hours ago :)
> Of course, attentional resourcing is one thing you could practice. I think
> many of these issues came up before (in the thread Thor was prominent in
> before), where 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'.
> I think I mentioned the
> cerebellum then too and the benefits (and indeed, requirement) that certain
> tasks are automated as much as possible for effective instrumental
> musicianship (as Paul has brought up in this thread). It may well be that
> the amount you can automate is more restricted with live coding, because
> more has to remain conscious and is not encapsulatable in physical motor
> memory or the like (though their are surely other mechanisms of storing
> cerebral 'licks').
Isn't programming all about encapsulation?
alex
Received on Wed Jan 10 2007 - 14:57:36 GMT