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The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

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Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#151

Post by john61 »

bane wrote: post #146
john61 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#152

Post by john61 »

bane wrote: post #145
john61 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 percei…

Have you ever played a Bösendorfer Imperial?

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#153

Post by john61 »

vidarh wrote: post #143
john61 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, the TI99/4A had no understanding of music. You have to have emotions to understand music. A Computer does not have emotions.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#154

Post by jerf »

tesseractive wrote: post #71
jerf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better, yes. Still not my taste, but less monotonous. Still, I'm not sure this "genre" has a lot of depths to explore. Their time and their choice, of course.

Rock started as music most people thought was too simple to be interesting, and so did jazz and a lot of early electronic music. I think it's really premature to write off a music style most people haven't even heard of yet. Given how much interesting music (IMO) has come from things like serialist classical, I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone finds ways of producing interesting sorts of tone color t…

Well, the natural next step for the "genre" is to use something other than just pianos, then use multiple instruments simultaneously, and before you know it you're "just" writing very polyphonic music.

It depends on how pedantic you want to be about the word "genre", and I tend to avoid the word entirely when possible because of the really weird (IMHO) ideations that surround it. But in this case, if we're going to keep it to "piano"-type sounds, which we pretty much have to if we're going to have a "problem" that needs solving anyhow, I think they've pretty much explored the space that's available to them.

And the primary reason for this is that they are not charging into a new, unexplored space... quite the contrary. The piano has been explored for hundreds of years. Rather than opening bold new fields of exploration, this is exploring the last few remnant bits that people couldn't cover earlier due to not having hundreds of fingers.

I understand being open to music ideas, but I also don't believe in entirely turning off my brain. I really don't think there's much "there" there.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#155

Post by john61 »

bane wrote: post #148
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.

Yes it is. The orchestra is the computer.

You say that a computer is equivalent to an orchestra?

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#156

Post by V-2 »

Holy smokes Batman, 21 million notes

Who'll be the first one to present a novel 21 million pages long :) It's quite a challenge as well (AI might help to take it in foreseeable future). Obviously haters gonna hate - shame on the haters.

Personally I'm more impressed by someone who puts together 210 words, but just the right words

Yes there are acclaimed authors who invent challenges for themselves, such as Georges Perec who wrote one novel without ever using the letter "e" etc.

It's quite fun, it's just meta - it's a bit of "literature about literature", or "music about music", so to speak.

Your goal is to prove a point, and art as such (the way I see it, of course) is not about proving a point.

If you need 20 million notes to achieve a certain effect, why can't this effect defend by itself, why the need to put this fact upfront, give it a name etc.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#157

Post by john61 »

bane wrote: post #149
PavlovsCat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grea…

Do you know and understand the painting "This is not a pipe" by Margritte?

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#158

Post by bane »

john61 wrote: post #152
bane wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 percei…

Have you ever played a Bösendorfer Imperial?

Yes. I can do you one better, I've even played the piano discussed here

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/03/international/europe/03RUS...

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#159

Post by jmmcd »

V-2 wrote: post #130
jmmcd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No surprise -- the people making negative comments here are the same people who said $(your favourite rebellious composer) wasn't music. People who say that are always judged as wrong, in the end.

"People who say that are always judged as wrong, in the end." By whom?

You're right to question my bald comment. My answer: history. I think the history of music (and more generally of art) is the story of the breaking-down of existing borders, while the history of those who would try to enforce the borders is the story of Canute on the beach.

Some early music used 5-note scales and regarded 2nds and 7ths as unusable (I'm referring to music in the west; folk music elsewhere often still uses 5-note scales). Early music was monophonic, but that limitation was overcome by the 12th century I think. Bach was genteel, but Beethoven was emotional. Brahms was tonal, but Debussy allowed atonality in music. Cage allowed aleatoric sounds to be music. Glass allowed excessive repetition of simple patterns to be music.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#160

Post by john61 »

tesseractive wrote: post #78
john61 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Kawai MP10 digital Piano and an old hand made analog Hofmann piano. If I play for example just the last Chord (6 Notes) of Chopin Prelude op. 28/4 on the Hofmann the music goes deep through every nerve. Nothing comparable happens on the Kawai even with very good speakers.

Are you saying that those 2 data points constitute a spanning set of the possibilities?

Do you understand the concept of a example?
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