Re: [PD] Turning non-audio data feeds into audio

-- Regards, Jerome Covington . . . . : . . . . : "define audio development" On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.cawrote: > On Sun, 11 Oct 2009, Jerome Covington wrote: > > Is anyone interested in sharing their process for turning real-time, >> non-audio data feeds, into music? See a great example of one possible >> direction, here. >> > > Coïncidentally, I wrote some thoughts about it in the Pd chatroom a few > hours before your email, because of a similar topic there: > > « > > musical meaningfulness comes from meaningfulness of the data beforehand... > basically, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. > > the exception to that is that a programme is a kind of data in itself, so > the programme can be considered a kind of meaningful input... and if the > programme imposes itself as the source of the meaning and successfully > downplays the incoming garbage, it can make the output meaningful; > > but unless one is very skilled at understanding the information theory > standpoint of music, using random values gives you just more meaningless > music like what you are talking about... sort of like picking a random book > from the library of babel. > > » > > http://vimeo.com/5415629 >> > > now this is what I add to my above thoughts, this time in relationship to > the video: without necessarily explicitly thinking about information theory, > one can get to interesting results intuitively... one essentially has to > focus on getting beautiful results for likely inputs instead of being > content with whatever fits with the description of a certain art concept. > Any former stock-market music I had listened to sounded like crap. What > Patrick did was to make his programme insert so much beauty and coherence in > the market's noise, that it made it sound meaningful... actually, it's more > like this: the programme can only output music that sounds reasonably good > no matter the input, and the meaningless input selects one of the possible > nice-sounding outputs. Overall, the music is more shaped by Patrick's > æsthetic decisions than by the stock market, and it's perfect like that. > > so, Jérôme, I would mostly just suggest that you make patches so that the > results sound fairly good no matter the input you give them, and optionally, > if you can make the input also recognisable in the output, it's a bonus > feature that can feel very rewarding, but it depends on the context... for > feeding stockmarket data it may not matter as much, but for live interactive > data from performers or visitors, they have to recognise their own impact on > the music, else the point is going to be lost on them, really. but even for > stockmarket data, it's better if you can recognise the stock price in the > music, because if you can't, you could have taken that data from anywhere > else and it wouldn't matter, so why would you call it stockmarket music > then?... > > so maybe you wanted people to explain their actual processes, but I hope > that you will also enjoy this reflexion on the question of what might make > processes be good or not. > > _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... > | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801