41–50 of 180 posts
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Or you can help yourself with your foot, like Jason D. Williams occasionally does.
That's called an Organ Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijQWm4H-zBU&noredirect=1
(thought she deserved the credit!)
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Pianos don't have souls, either. Maybe I'd understand your complaint if it was about computer composition of music, but this is just using the computer as an instrument. Would you say flute players can't play music "with soul" because they aren't directly whistling the noises? Why not? How is that qualitatively different from using a computer to play your composition?
Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.
As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play. This, however, is just ridiculous. The thing is, it's not at all hard to write a piano piece that's unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you). It doesn't need to be a grotesque fountain of m…
Contrasted to its acoustic opposite, chip-tune minimalism, and I'll take chip-tune anyday, even in its "pure" form (limited polyphony, no postprocessing, etc, just as you would have found it back in the day).
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Ever played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor? 4 well separated simultaneous note groups in a couple of places. That makes it theoretically impossible to play...
Igudesman & Joo have their own way of playing stuff like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w
As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play. This, however, is just ridiculous. The thing is, it's not at all hard to write a piano piece that's unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you). It doesn't need to be a grotesque fountain of m…
We could critique the medium, but people have abused instruments and sound makers for generations. Look up prepared piano [1], glitch music [2], and the wide world of guitar effects. This is just another way exploring the possibilities of a given medium (MIDI, in this case).
Theoretically, we could generate all possible music just by adding together sine waves, but realistically, most music is only accessible by using far more limited mechanisms, like instruments, gadgets, and paradigmatic software, which in turn influence the creative process. A person is definitely free to critique the artistic merits of a given piece, but I think it's rather close-minded to critique an entire medium. Most of the styles of music we listen to were (or still are) considered cheating by adherents to some other style.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_piano [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_%28music%29
The way I see this is another form of additive synthesis, with poor (technical) sound quality and less control/expressiveness¹. I'd guess a lot of music would appear "black" if represented as MIDI sequence for a pure sine-wave synthesizer. [1] not to disparage it too much as an artform. Art forms from what the artist able to with the medium of choice, and the choice of medium does not it make it automatically better…
Interestingly, we do have this, and it is a crucial component of lossy audio compression techniques such as MP3 - it's the Fourier transform. Essentially you can convert any audio signal into sine intensity per frequency over time, and vice versa. The space-time resolution is somewhat adjustable, so quicker reaction time can be obtained at the expense of squishing nearby frequencies together. I would not describe a lot of music that I have observed as spectrograms as being "black," in fact there are visible patterns that correspond with the harmonics of the sounds being played.
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Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.
That sounds kind of esoteric / superstitious to me. Has this been blind tested? Anyway... computer music has the soul of the people selecting the samples and the parameters for instrument synthesis, and choosing when and how to play them. That's why all that is done manually. Heck, on the C64 (probably not just there) it wasn't unusual for composers to write their own composing software and playback routines.
Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.
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Ever played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor? 4 well separated simultaneous note groups in a couple of places. That makes it theoretically impossible to play...
I'm assuming that since you bring up Rachmaninoff, you know that he reportedly had freakishly large hands, and was in the habit of writing things he could play, but others considered "impossible". To me, that's significantly different than black MIDI, which just seems silly, albeit vaguely amusing.