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Everything we can't describe in music

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Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#61

Post by odyssey7 »

malloryerik wrote: post #51
odyssey7 wrote: post #4

Arnold Schoenberg observed the deep connection between music, perception, and cognition; anticipated composers applying timbral control as is now commonly done with synthesizers; and apparently did not anticipate non-subtlety of the effect in EDM: "I think the tone becomes perceptible by virtue of tone color [timbre], of which one dimension is pitch. ... Pitch is nothing else but tone color measured in one direction.…

I very much appreciate your comment, and at the same time am interested to challenge this idea of "the illusion of music". What about music is an illusion? Maybe this was just an unfortunate phrasing, and yet it might touch on the heart of the matter. Music is a language of relationships, indeed it is nothing but relationships, in time, pitch, timbre, volume, voice, number and so on, non-symbolic and changing relatio…

My use of illusion was not intended to diminish the significance of music. To the contrary, I meant to distinguish it as an exceptional perceptual phenomenon which reveals important aspects of the inner workings of human experience.

Somehow, the physical situations of our bodies become perceptual experiences. Usually, those perceptions are mere descriptions of the physical world, for physically navigating it. Some exceptions exist, such as music and optical illusions. The translation from air pressure fluctuations to a tree branch falling is one type of experience, the link to love or hope is another. Rather than being insignificant, my sense is that music understanding will prove to be an emergent capability available in whatever architecture might produce humanlike AGI, because it connects human perception and cognition too thoroughly to not be baked-in. Going further, building models to understand music would be an excellent step toward embodied AI with humanlike cognition.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#62

Post by mrob »

analog31 wrote: post #21
taco_emoji wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the shape of the wave. Sawtooth waves are buzzier or "brighter" than sine waves, for example.

For periodic signals the waveform and the overtone series precisely determine one another.

And the human ear is mostly insensitive to phase of those overtones, so you can have waves with visually very different waveform that sound identical.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#63

Post by mrob »

artimaeis wrote: post #40
taco_emoji wrote: post #2

"Terroir" is a terrible way to metaphorize timbre. The only similarity is that they're both hard to describe. Terroir is there before the wine is made and can't really be controlled by the winemaker (except insofar as they choose where to plant or what grapes to blend). Timbre is absolutely under the control of the musician.

I think this is just another point of frustration with trying to define timbre. There's definitely some points directly under control: attack and brightness come to mind. Then there's some that are less directly under control: the room and the instrument itself. It's no accident that musicians spend a lot of money on instruments -- even electric guitar players -- an instrument that is electronically amplified and oft…

>Different wood types will produce different tonal characteristics.

True for acoustic guitars, but for electric guitars this is thoroughly debunked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE

Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36106674

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#64

Post by andoando »

odyssey7 wrote: post #61
malloryerik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much appreciate your comment, and at the same time am interested to challenge this idea of "the illusion of music". What about music is an illusion? Maybe this was just an unfortunate phrasing, and yet it might touch on the heart of the matter. Music is a language of relationships, indeed it is nothing but relationships, in time, pitch, timbre, volume, voice, number and so on, non-symbolic and changing relatio…

My use of illusion was not intended to diminish the significance of music. To the contrary, I meant to distinguish it as an exceptional perceptual phenomenon which reveals important aspects of the inner workings of human experience. Somehow, the physical situations of our bodies become perceptual experiences. Usually, those perceptions are mere descriptions of the physical world, for physically navigating it. Some ex…

This is something I've been thinking about the last 3-4 years and desperately what I am trying to do.

I have what I think some interesting ideas and implementations, but no one quite grasps my thought process and I am stuck between believing Im onto something and that I am furiously chasing nothing.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#65

Post by mrob »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #12

> Another way to think about timbre is by comparing instruments. In an old stand-up bit, Steve Martin strummed the banjo and mused, “You just can’t sing a depressing song when you’re playing the banjo . . . You can’t just go, ‘Oh, death, and grief, and sorrow, and murder.’ Anyone who's played Outer Wilds should disagree with this.[0] To say we can't describe timbre is a bit misleading, because there are concrete math…

>You can’t just go, ‘Oh, death, and grief, and sorrow, and murder.’

There's a whole sub-genre about this that's commonly played on banjo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_ballad

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#66

Post by andoando »

odyssey7 wrote: post #17
andoando wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a simple thought a couple years ago that still fascinates me. If you do something as simple as "clap clap clap" (with equal measures of time), you can naturally relate it to any other set of sounds with that simple pattern (ABABA). moreover, there is a 1 to 1 relation of this abstraction in space, where one can represent the sounds as marks on a screen (as I have done here for example, as "clap clap clap, X X X…

What you illustrate is deeply fascinating. In music, there is a grammatical perception that works both cognitively and as an embodied experience.

Yes, but its not just music. Our senses are very much linked in that we can build a one to one relation of ideas in visual space to auditory space and vice versa. There is a common abstract model we understand so to speak.

Our model of perception is very finely tuned with that of space-time.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#68

Post by schwartzworld »

muxator wrote: post #60

The way a sound evolves in time contains a lot of timbrical information. Different harmonics have different ADSR curves (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release). Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack transient. There are famous experiments in psychoacoustics that show that, when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart. Personal anecdot…

> when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart

A neat trick is playing guitar through a volume pedal. You mute the sound, pluck a string and then swell in the volume pedal. The rest of the ASDR envelope can be created with other effects like delays.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#69

Post by mrob »

elihu wrote: post #53
nicklecompte wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"everything is possible" except for a synthesized instrument that actually has the expressive range of a real violin or saxophone. Even a synthesized piano is noticeably lifeless compared to the real thing (synthesized piano bass notes are especially thin).

It depends on what synth you're using, and how you're controlling it. Most synthesizers and controllers are profoundly lacking in expressive control, and of course a synthesizer that just plays back a recorded sample of a real piano isn't going to sound as good as being in a room with the real thing. Just because the mainstream synthesizer world has been sort of stuck in a rut for 40 years doesn't mean this is the be…

A real piano is also profoundly lacking in expressive control over timbre (excluding extended techniques like half-pedaling or directly touching the strings that hardly ever show up in the repertoire). The only control the piano gives you over note timbre is how hard you press the key. Once you've done that, the hammer disconnects from the key and flies through the air out of your control.

A keyboard with polyphonic aftertouch, such as the Yamaha CS-80 (famously played by Vangelis), is objectively more expressive than a piano.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#70

Post by mrob »

muxator wrote: post #60

The way a sound evolves in time contains a lot of timbrical information. Different harmonics have different ADSR curves (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release). Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack transient. There are famous experiments in psychoacoustics that show that, when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart. Personal anecdot…

>Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack transient.

Roland used this fact to produce surprisingly realistic sounds at low cost. When memory was too expensive to sample the whole note, you could get excellent results from sampling just the transient and using traditional subtractive synthesis for the rest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_arithmetic_synthesis

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