On Sun, 19 Jun 2011 21:36 +0100, "Marco Donnarumma" devel@thesaddj.com wrote:
there are many nuances, but I mentioned that as the text in Onyx's video read: "so that beatjazzers become as common as djs." Do you really need cables everywhere, sensors, a mouthpiece with two guitar pickups, a smartphone stick to your forearm, etc.. to achieve such goal?
Wait a moment. I'm not saying his work is bad or anything. I made safe my respect for his work at the beginning.
I'm just saying, guys it's TED and when I heard gestural and sensor control I expected another kind of work, underpinned by another kind of aesthetic, approach, and motivation. But, I probably overestimated which is the value and motivation of new technologies which need to be shown to the mainstream public.
"...he clearly has musical skill with his instrument, and is able to keep the musical timing tight. These are all difficult things to do, and from what I've seen 95% of performance with new interfaces for musical expression does not achieve one of those goals solidly."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxnFbU6-_eU&feature=player_embedded#at=51
that was in 2008 by Eboman, using not only real time audio looping, but also video looping and processing, plus remix of a website online.
Hans, Onyx is playing mostly loops isn't he? How you know about the timing? We don't even know how much of what he's doing is really live, what is he triggering, if timing is controlled by a timeline or by his performance. Please, correct me if I'm wrong. But I saw a lot of loops playing on a timeline and some solos parts possibly produced through the mouthpiece.
I'm not talking about the quality of the performance which is obviously good, reliable and enjoyable. I'm pointing at the real value of the innovation since it's a TED episode.
So that Eboman performance is a nice performance, he's doing some adept gestural control of sound, and the whole thing put together seems quite engaging. I think Eboman has a very different goal than Onyx Ashanti. Eboman is a live media performance, Onyx Ashanti is a musician. The sounds that Eboman is making would really not be very engaging without the live drummer. It would just be scratching of the video, which could be a good media performance, but doesn't seem very musical. And even with the live drummer, the music is pretty repetative. Without the novelty of the video sampling the live camera, it would not stand very well as a musical performance. I think the audience would have been bored. But Eboman is doing a media performance, so it doesn't make much sense to judge it as a musical performance.
From what I've seen, Onyx Ashanti is trying to dive deep into
musicianship, with less of a show than your average sax soloist. Whether or not you like his music is a separate question, I think its very hard to refute that he has musical skill and talent with his instrument. And that is very rare with new interfaces for musical expression.
.hc