On 11 Sep 2006, at 14:11, Fredrik Olofsson wrote:
> (of course i'm lazy these days and don't follow my own advice :-)
> but i used to play the trumpet almost every day for 13 years.
> wonder why it's so hard with discipline when it comes to coding...)
i think that perhaps the answer to this question lies in the freedom
from traditional discipline that livecoding offers the performer.
with an acoustic instrument such as a trumpet we use repetitive
practise to internalise the range of pitches and timbres, intervals
and rhythms, that are available to us. you can get more adventurous -
experimenting with vocalising, half-valve fingering, circular
breathing, hitting it with sticks etc., - but none of that means
squat unless you can also play the flight of the bumble bee really
fast, and hold a high c well past the time when lesser mortals would
pass out.
[ the freesound project is always fun -
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
tagsViewSingle.php?id=1412_2452 ]
perhaps the best way to express livecoding in traditional musical
terms would be free improv played on a half-built imaginary
instrument. as such you have to invent your own criteria for success,
and test yourself against them. i used to play the saxophone and
recently bought a yamaha wx7 to try to transfer the vestiges of those
skills into a hybrid and purely computer mediated environment,
although my lack of typing skills and mild dyslexia has pushed me
towards bidule, which compensates for my inadequacies by letting me
pretend that lego and sliders are coding.
however i am not finding that what i considered skills (the thought
patterns and physical self-control that allowed me to create a set of
pre-determined effects) are more than minimally transferrable. which
is not to say that i can't make a noise that sounds like someone
reasonably competent making a noise using computers! but i have
ended up with no criteria for success that i find convincing.
i read a research paper recently which suggested that in default of
any other way to judge the value of something the naive observer will
tend to estimate the amount of effort that has been put into making
it, more being better. an expert would i expect look at something and
think, 'in the circumstances remarkably little effort seems to have
been expended in achieving that remarkably difficult thing. but then,
if like me you are a fan of minimalist pop music, you might be
searching for the very easy thing that is just remarkably good at
pushing the pleasure buttons. i'm very interested in alex's idea that
doing less in performance might result in more of something, and that
doing more is not necessarily a desirable end in itself.
cheerio
paul
Received on Mon Sep 11 2006 - 15:55:39 BST