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The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

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Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#141

Post by vidarh »

john61 wrote: post #128
bane wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? It doesn't mean the composer can't write music that exceeds the ability of any human performer and still encode the nuance they intended into the performance. Just because I can't humanly play Paganini's Caprices doesn't mean it's bad music.

If the composer writes music that is not even playable by himself, then this music is never played by a human. Therefore a soul to soul communication to the listener is impossible.

I don't even know what a "soul to soul communication" is intended to mean. It sounds like you are applying some mystic qualities to it. I think most of us here don't think that the act of performance itself adds anything to the quality of the sound of the music over and beyond the sounds that are recorded, and so a "recording" that is painstakingly generated note by note is to me no different from one that is played live as long as they sound the same. If a piece has never, ever been played live, it makes no difference to me.

This "soul to soul communication" you talk of has no meaning to me.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#142

Post by john61 »

vidarh wrote: post #140
john61 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer can not paint like Leonardo Da Vinci. He can not write like Shakespeare. And he can not play music like Sviatlosav Richter. A prush, pencil, and musical instrument that can not be used by humans is therefore useless.

Your premise and your conclusion is entirely unconnected by any form of logic. The point of the post you reply to is that art can be created even when it is not possible or meaningful to do it as a live performance. Performers do not have a monopoly on creating art. In fact, sometimes performers are props that are or have been necessary due to the lack of technology.

Music does not exist until the moment it is played. Therefore you need the performance to create art out of a composition. Computers can not create art.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#143

Post by vidarh »

john61 wrote: post #48
PavlovsCat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the C64 days I programmed my TI99/4A to play Bach. It sounded awful. The interpretation had no soul. Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.

And all your experience tells us is that the Ti99/4A did not have good sound chips and/or you are not good at writing music for it. Meanwhile, I still listen to certain C64 music regularly that I greatly enjoy, because the composer knew how to extract great music even from something as limited as that.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#144

Post by vidarh »

john61 wrote: post #142
vidarh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your premise and your conclusion is entirely unconnected by any form of logic. The point of the post you reply to is that art can be created even when it is not possible or meaningful to do it as a live performance. Performers do not have a monopoly on creating art. In fact, sometimes performers are props that are or have been necessary due to the lack of technology.

Music does not exist until the moment it is played. Therefore you need the performance to create art out of a composition. Computers can not create art.

I don't agree with your premise. The composition as much art, often more so, than the performance. For most of the music I listen to, including the classical music, I want the performance to be a faithful reproduction of the intention of the composition. For sheet music, you need the performer to interpret, but if he or she interprets outside of well established norms, the piece will sound off.

For electronic compositions rendered directly to a sufficiently precise format (which MIDI is not), you need no separate performance - the act of composing it and performing it is the same.

Since I reject your premise, your conclusion is irrelevant to me, and I don't think there's any chance we will get any further.

I see from other comments that you imbue the touch of a human performer some special quality beyond the qualities purely physical sound generated, and to me that is pure superstition with no basis in reality. You might as well try to convince me fairies are real.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#145

Post by bane »

john61 wrote: post #122
bane wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good musician can play world class music on a rusty spoon, a used pie plate and a one-string-out-of-tune-$20-guitar. Crap musicians are those that rely on fancy instruments to make up for their lack of basic musicianship. Even a drunk martini bar pianist can sound halfway decent on a $70k Steinway or Bösendorfer.

I do not doubt that. But to return to the original point, a good instrument has a soul, as a good musician has. My digital-Kawai does not have one, my analog Hofmann has. My musical skills have nothing to do with that.

The nature of the instrument doesn't dictate its soul. A digital piano was made with just as much care and soul as a regular old piano.

Even instruments with very limited expressiveness are no less important. Yanni regularly brings listeners to tears and he plays as much on a synth as he does on a traditional piano.

"Soulfulness" didn't stop with the digital revolution. You're simply no sophisticated enough to perceive it. Even instruments like a tb303 have brought deep meaning, and communicated emotional soulful intention, to millions.

Your emotional range is just too narrow to feel it. Blame yourself not the instruments.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#146

Post by bane »

john61 wrote: post #128
bane wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? It doesn't mean the composer can't write music that exceeds the ability of any human performer and still encode the nuance they intended into the performance. Just because I can't humanly play Paganini's Caprices doesn't mean it's bad music.

If the composer writes music that is not even playable by himself, then this music is never played by a human. Therefore a soul to soul communication to the listener is impossible.

99.999% of composers write music they don't and can't play themselves. That's why techniques like this are appealing, because the composer can write the performance at the same time. The written music is the performance. There's no obtuse performer screwing up the composer's will in this scenario.

You have a fundamentally broken concept about music.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#147

Post by bane »

john61 wrote: post #58
Stwerp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply. For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc. This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to…

No soul, is not imprecision. It is the expression of humans feelings in form of variation of duration, velocity, loudness. For example speed in music is like speed in breathing. You are not breathing with the same speed all the time. It depends on the context. If you are in a hurry you breathe fast and short. If you sigh you breathe deep and slow. An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported…

> duration, velocity, loudness

Then harpsichords have no soul and Bach would like to have a word with you.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#148

Post by bane »

john61 wrote: post #113
PavlovsCat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With computer music, the act of composition and the act of playing it are one and the same. It's like writing a piece, having an orchestra play it, then going back to the score sheet and changing something, over and over. Usually at some point time, patience and/or inspiration run out, long before the song is really good -- but that's a limitation of the state of the art(ists), not of music made with computers in gen…

No it is not. There is no orchestra. There is an context less, static description of tones, called sheet music or MIDI. These description gets transformed to music whenever a musician plays it or to a set of soulless notes if a computer plays it.

Yes it is. The orchestra is the computer.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#149

Post by bane »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #120
john61 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. There is no orchestra. There is an context less, static description of tones, called sheet music or MIDI. These description gets transformed to music whenever a musician plays it or to a set of soulless notes if a computer plays it.

As I said already, MIDI is kind of crude and hardly the last word. The description can be as detailed as the brain of the composer can handle it. The acts of composition and performance are indistinguishable. You could even manually set the amplitude of 44100 (or more) points per second if you wanted to... arguably the musicians that can make full use of the possibilities that exist even now haven't even been born ye…

He's making a more fundamental mistake, borne by his lack of emotional range.

He's arguing that every poem cannot have a soul, only during the recitation of a poem, by a live performer, can the work take on the kind of soulful meaning.

Yet this criteria, a human must perform art for it to have a soul, eliminates all non-performance art. Painting, sculpture, etc. all has no soul.

Yet this is obviously not true. A great painting has soul just as much as any other art.

So what happens when you have a poem, crafted as a sculpture? We've already determined that sculptures have a "soul", therefore something like this http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GIchwvJ-aNk/SxMre-2FXnI/AAAAAAAANW... has a soul, but no human performed it. The emotional connection is made via the writer and the sculpture (who may even be the same person). Yet, no human can "perform" this sculpture.

In cases like the OP, the music we have here is no different than a sculpture of the composer's intention. No human performs it, yet it's no less valid than if it was written down for an orchestra of painists to perform.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#150

Post by john61 »

vidarh wrote: post #144
john61 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music does not exist until the moment it is played. Therefore you need the performance to create art out of a composition. Computers can not create art.

I don't agree with your premise. The composition as much art, often more so, than the performance. For most of the music I listen to, including the classical music, I want the performance to be a faithful reproduction of the intention of the composition. For sheet music, you need the performer to interpret, but if he or she interprets outside of well established norms, the piece will sound off. For electronic composi…

Do you play an analog instrument?
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