Well in my opinion most electroacoustic shit is all surrealist/dadaist crap.
The people involved try too hard to be the electronic version of John Cage, it's quite annoying. In fact, I'm so against it that I'm going to come up with a parody album with actual good dance music that uses elements of the academic code geek norm with real electronic music that have titles like "computer scientists make for very bad musicians" and "chainsaw in a cave, recorded 6 feet down"
In all seriousness though, i like the science.
However, I believe that just because it's accepted academically doesn't mean that it will put you ahead of everyone else nor do I like/take part in the elitism that follows which is ten times worse.
I read the CCRMA and IRCAM articles/publications, use Max, Csound, ChucK, and all of that jazz. I even read the Pd/Max/Csound/Chuck mailing lists too but I choose to make actual music with those tools. I use Renoise for sequencing because it can send open sound control data to the extra stuff, then I multitrack it in whatever DAW I feel like using that day whether it's Pro Tools, Live, Logic, DP, or whatever really. Most of what I make is just normal synthesis stuff, like what you would get out of a synth/workstation anyways but I like the fact that I made what I'm using, or heavily modified it if it was sampled.
An off subjerct example but relative is the guys with modular synthesizers. You can go to youtube and see videos with these guys with big huge multithousand dollar Buchla synthesizers and they make this repetitive crap that sounds like it came from lost in space. Then, they just keep turning knobs and it's the same thing for five minutes. It's like, wtf is that trash nobody is going to listen to that...
The technical ability to program synths is great, and I love people who take the time to be scientific about their sound but to me the whole entire point of music is about being technical with a control present. You can look at all of the great classical composers, marching band composers, composers/musicians on labels and find the same thing. If I was to go to school to study music and electronics, and figured out that I can get a plastic drum, destroy an alarm clock to make a contact microphone, and do some basic signal processing I can do much the same thing then I would be asking serious questions.
I guess for someone who's learning, that stuff is fine but these big institutions who teach music already require one to take proper music courses in primary school yet we find 5 minute 20 hz drones everywhere with some white noise. Are the teachers assigning this stuff? Are they mad? I grew up in a super small area in Washington state and I've never been to college so I wouldn't know but what comes out of this circle is baffling.
Perhaps it was just the way I was musically brought up, I don't know. I had a crazy band teacher in primary school who would flunk you if you didn't show up to any of the performances, and dock your grade if you didn't practice so many hours a week that had to be logged and signed by a parent. Plus, you had all the standard music theory stuff, tests on melodic, chromatic, harmonic scales, sometimes the odd ones too, inversions, chords, and so forth. My mom would listen to Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bluegrass music which in my opinion is very technical. I was into house and dance when I was in my preteens to late teens and my mother used to always say that stuff isn't music because it repeats too much. Eventually I saw her wisdom and started listening to lots of Prog Rock and Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Industrial Metal, and stuff like that and it totally changed my view.
I think it's all too easy to get caught up in the technology behind production, and leave the good stuff out. Most of the stuff, including my own that's made with computers just doesn't have that same feel even after I spent 8 hours programming complex drum patterns note by note in a numeric based step sequencer.
However, in my case my own musical control would be the simple math that makes up harmony and melody. Some however can defy this and still make good music, like Sonic Youth for instance or other people who have experimental music actually published on a reputable experimental label. There's still structure there, what is up with this other post-modernist stuff?
Shouldn't artistic enrichment be the goal? Did I miss the boat?
To me, music is controlled noise. You can make a math equation based on chaos theory and apply it to a sequence, but then it becomes noise. You can destroy all sense of scale and timing, but then it becomes noise.
I mean, i can sit there on a synth patch and make noise for 8 hours or I could just go write a song.
Personally, I'll choose to write the song.
On 1/29/11 12:16 PM, Josh Moore wrote:
Well in my opinion most electroacoustic shit is all surrealist/dadaist crap.
The people involved try too hard to be the electronic version of John Cage, it's quite annoying. In fact, I'm so against it that I'm going to come up with a parody album with actual good dance music that uses elements of the academic code geek norm with real electronic music that have titles like "computer scientists make for very bad musicians" and "chainsaw in a cave, recorded 6 feet down"
<Rest of polemic deleted for brevity's sake>
You're certainly going way out on a limb with that position -- I mean, how brave of you to take up the mantle of champion for poor, defenseless "good dance music".
If it weren't for experimentalists, the tools used by pop musicians to make "good dance music" wouldn't exist in the first place. If you don't like the compositions made by experimentalists, don't listen to them, but you haven't come up with a compelling argument for the innate superiority of the music you happen to find enjoyable, merely a rather juvenile list of pejoratives for that which doesn't happen to appeal to your taste.
By the way, it is considered bad nettiquette to cross-post to several lists like this. I have limited my reply to one list.
Phil Stone www.pkstonemusic.com
a: Too long, didn't read b: bile, absolute bile aimed directly at people who might well be offended by it *sigh* get a life.
I am a newbie in electronic music (not dance music by the way, electronic in the broad sense) but i am also a "classic" musician, teacher, I also played in traditional music groups etc... background aside here goes the idea.
A long time ago, in the renaissance and before, a third and a sixth were considered a dissonant interval. Consonants where only the forth, fifth and octave... this could be caused by a lot of different aspects, one of them was the Temperament of the scale that was quit different from the 12 equal semitones used later. Also the music was made primarily to be sang and played in church and monasteries were the reverberation was big. After that came the keyboard instruments and the difficulty of tuning of the same instruments on different key signatures, this lead to a standard of twelve equal semitones that allow "interchangeability" of keys. Some years later came the continuous modulation, after that the dodecaphonic series and after that integral serialism and electronic instruments etc etc etc. Each of this changes were highly disregarded by the broad public being used later on for more "commercial music".
What i want to say is that, you may not like some type of music,I dont like techno, even the pseudo good techno, on a bar, or at my music player, however it has its space on a disco. Each music has its time, its progression. Time its the best filter, maybe 90 % of the music created nowadays will not be heard in 200 years, but when the music touches senses it will endure. there where hundreds of baroque and classical composers at their time, however you only know a handful of them.... sometimes we as a society need time to assimilate change. Maybe a chainsaw is more musical than a violin, it all depends how the music is made, how the musical discourse and flow goes. apart of the music, there will be always place for "etudes". Problem is that nowadays each composition student does an exercise and call it a piece... but that is a social problem not of the techniques.
sorry for the rant bye
2011/1/30 beatthefinalboss@gmail.com
I even read the Pd/Max/Csound/Chuck mailing lists too but I choose to make actual music with those tools.
How do you define "Actual Music"? Some of us happen to define "chainsaw in cave 6 feet down" as music ;)
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"Problem is that nowadays each composition student does an exercise and call it a piece... but that is a social problem not of the techniques."
Greetings Ricardo :)
2011/1/29 Ricardo Lameiro ricardolameiro@gmail.com
I am a newbie in electronic music (not dance music by the way, electronic in the broad sense) but i am also a "classic" musician, teacher, I also played in traditional music groups etc... background aside here goes the idea.
A long time ago, in the renaissance and before, a third and a sixth were considered a dissonant interval. Consonants where only the forth, fifth and octave... this could be caused by a lot of different aspects, one of them was the Temperament of the scale that was quit different from the 12 equal semitones used later. Also the music was made primarily to be sang and played in church and monasteries were the reverberation was big. After that came the keyboard instruments and the difficulty of tuning of the same instruments on different key signatures, this lead to a standard of twelve equal semitones that allow "interchangeability" of keys. Some years later came the continuous modulation, after that the dodecaphonic series and after that integral serialism and electronic instruments etc etc etc. Each of this changes were highly disregarded by the broad public being used later on for more "commercial music".
What i want to say is that, you may not like some type of music,I dont like techno, even the pseudo good techno, on a bar, or at my music player, however it has its space on a disco. Each music has its time, its progression. Time its the best filter, maybe 90 % of the music created nowadays will not be heard in 200 years, but when the music touches senses it will endure. there where hundreds of baroque and classical composers at their time, however you only know a handful of them.... sometimes we as a society need time to assimilate change. Maybe a chainsaw is more musical than a violin, it all depends how the music is made, how the musical discourse and flow goes. apart of the music, there will be always place for "etudes". Problem is that nowadays each composition student does an exercise and call it a piece... but that is a social problem not of the techniques.
sorry for the rant bye
2011/1/30 beatthefinalboss@gmail.com
I even read the Pd/Max/Csound/Chuck mailing lists too but I choose to
make actual music with those tools.
How do you define "Actual Music"? Some of us happen to define "chainsaw in cave 6 feet down" as music ;)
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
-- Fagote / Contrafagote Bassoon / Contra-bassoon http://myspace.com/ricardolameiro
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
To all involved in this discussion, the last few responses were great. :)
It was a bit harsh to some, and I figured as much but it's also a very real question. Beatthefinalboss and a couple others hit the nail on the head, and that's partially what I meant in my long rant.
From the things I've read and seen I understood that eventually the
techniques pioneered by Max/Miller/Vercoe/etc have always found their way into popular music. The comment about braindance as well was also noted, and I enjoy that music.
It was originally Brian Transeau that got me interested about Csound and what it was early on. I didn't like it then and needed a few more years of sound design experience, but it's wonderful now with csound~ as an external in maxforlive and all of the tools Csound has now.
I just think in many ways there is too much emphasis on experimenting. A better way to say this is I tend to like Debussy more than I like Schoenberg, Stockhausen, or Cage. There are simply lots of aspects of 20th century contemporary academic music that are just strange to me. I also agree with the statement on Kraftwerk. They took what was there and made it marketable.
Same goes for bands like Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails in contrast to stuff like Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubaten. (though they've toned down lately)
If you go on youtube and search up The Beatles and Yoko Ono you may find this video where Yoko Ono is telling the beatles to play randomly on their instruments to create noise music while she shrieks and makes weird noises. The Beatles are capable of making excellent music, but this was really bad.
It was more a philosophical question/rant than anything really. Experimental music in the sense of drones and so on is quite new in the scene, not historically though since many other tribal cultures had it too and perhaps that's partially where it comes from.
On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Mario maredmo@gmail.com wrote:
"Problem is that nowadays each composition student does an exercise and call it a piece... but that is a social problem not of the techniques." Greetings Ricardo :)
2011/1/29 Ricardo Lameiro ricardolameiro@gmail.com
I am a newbie in electronic music (not dance music by the way, electronic in the broad sense) but i am also a "classic" musician, teacher, I also played in traditional music groups etc... background aside here goes the idea.
A long time ago, in the renaissance and before, a third and a sixth were considered a dissonant interval. Consonants where only the forth, fifth and octave... this could be caused by a lot of different aspects, one of them was the Temperament of the scale that was quit different from the 12 equal semitones used later. Also the music was made primarily to be sang and played in church and monasteries were the reverberation was big. After that came the keyboard instruments and the difficulty of tuning of the same instruments on different key signatures, this lead to a standard of twelve equal semitones that allow "interchangeability" of keys. Some years later came the continuous modulation, after that the dodecaphonic series and after that integral serialism and electronic instruments etc etc etc. Each of this changes were highly disregarded by the broad public being used later on for more "commercial music".
What i want to say is that, you may not like some type of music,I dont like techno, even the pseudo good techno, on a bar, or at my music player, however it has its space on a disco. Each music has its time, its progression. Time its the best filter, maybe 90 % of the music created nowadays will not be heard in 200 years, but when the music touches senses it will endure. there where hundreds of baroque and classical composers at their time, however you only know a handful of them.... sometimes we as a society need time to assimilate change. Maybe a chainsaw is more musical than a violin, it all depends how the music is made, how the musical discourse and flow goes. apart of the music, there will be always place for "etudes". Problem is that nowadays each composition student does an exercise and call it a piece... but that is a social problem not of the techniques.
sorry for the rant bye
2011/1/30 beatthefinalboss@gmail.com
I even read the Pd/Max/Csound/Chuck mailing lists too but I choose to make actual music with those tools.
How do you define "Actual Music"? Some of us happen to define "chainsaw in cave 6 feet down" as music ;)
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
-- Fagote / Contrafagote Bassoon / Contra-bassoon http://myspace.com/ricardolameiro
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
Actually, that comment was meant towards Ricardo not Beatthefinalboss, it's weird reading a mailinglist in gmail. Sorry for the confusion!
On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Josh Moore kh405.7h30ry@gmail.com wrote:
To all involved in this discussion, the last few responses were great. :)
It was a bit harsh to some, and I figured as much but it's also a very real question. Beatthefinalboss and a couple others hit the nail on the head, and that's partially what I meant in my long rant.
From the things I've read and seen I understood that eventually the techniques pioneered by Max/Miller/Vercoe/etc have always found their way into popular music. The comment about braindance as well was also noted, and I enjoy that music.
It was originally Brian Transeau that got me interested about Csound and what it was early on. I didn't like it then and needed a few more years of sound design experience, but it's wonderful now with csound~ as an external in maxforlive and all of the tools Csound has now.
I just think in many ways there is too much emphasis on experimenting. A better way to say this is I tend to like Debussy more than I like Schoenberg, Stockhausen, or Cage. There are simply lots of aspects of 20th century contemporary academic music that are just strange to me. I also agree with the statement on Kraftwerk. They took what was there and made it marketable.
Same goes for bands like Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails in contrast to stuff like Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubaten. (though they've toned down lately)
If you go on youtube and search up The Beatles and Yoko Ono you may find this video where Yoko Ono is telling the beatles to play randomly on their instruments to create noise music while she shrieks and makes weird noises. The Beatles are capable of making excellent music, but this was really bad.
It was more a philosophical question/rant than anything really. Experimental music in the sense of drones and so on is quite new in the scene, not historically though since many other tribal cultures had it too and perhaps that's partially where it comes from.
On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Mario maredmo@gmail.com wrote:
"Problem is that nowadays each composition student does an exercise and call it a piece... but that is a social problem not of the techniques." Greetings Ricardo :)
2011/1/29 Ricardo Lameiro ricardolameiro@gmail.com
I am a newbie in electronic music (not dance music by the way, electronic in the broad sense) but i am also a "classic" musician, teacher, I also played in traditional music groups etc... background aside here goes the idea.
A long time ago, in the renaissance and before, a third and a sixth were considered a dissonant interval. Consonants where only the forth, fifth and octave... this could be caused by a lot of different aspects, one of them was the Temperament of the scale that was quit different from the 12 equal semitones used later. Also the music was made primarily to be sang and played in church and monasteries were the reverberation was big. After that came the keyboard instruments and the difficulty of tuning of the same instruments on different key signatures, this lead to a standard of twelve equal semitones that allow "interchangeability" of keys. Some years later came the continuous modulation, after that the dodecaphonic series and after that integral serialism and electronic instruments etc etc etc. Each of this changes were highly disregarded by the broad public being used later on for more "commercial music".
What i want to say is that, you may not like some type of music,I dont like techno, even the pseudo good techno, on a bar, or at my music player, however it has its space on a disco. Each music has its time, its progression. Time its the best filter, maybe 90 % of the music created nowadays will not be heard in 200 years, but when the music touches senses it will endure. there where hundreds of baroque and classical composers at their time, however you only know a handful of them.... sometimes we as a society need time to assimilate change. Maybe a chainsaw is more musical than a violin, it all depends how the music is made, how the musical discourse and flow goes. apart of the music, there will be always place for "etudes". Problem is that nowadays each composition student does an exercise and call it a piece... but that is a social problem not of the techniques.
sorry for the rant bye
2011/1/30 beatthefinalboss@gmail.com
I even read the Pd/Max/Csound/Chuck mailing lists too but I choose to make actual music with those tools.
How do you define "Actual Music"? Some of us happen to define "chainsaw in cave 6 feet down" as music ;)
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
-- Fagote / Contrafagote Bassoon / Contra-bassoon http://myspace.com/ricardolameiro
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
Great reference to 4:33 Jonathan :D
--- On Sat, 1/29/11, Josh Moore kh405.7h30ry@gmail.com wrote:
From: Josh Moore kh405.7h30ry@gmail.com Subject: [PD] Am I alone? To: pd-list@iem.at, chuck-users@lists.cs.princeton.edu, csound@lists.bath.ac.uk, max@bek.no Date: Saturday, January 29, 2011, 9:16 PM Well in my opinion most electroacoustic shit is all surrealist/dadaist crap.
[list I_agree Unsure WTF +1 Screw_you Welcome_to_the_list( | | [loadbang] | | | [random 6] | | | [+ 1] | | | [adddollar $1( | / | / |/ [ ( | [print response]
The people involved try too hard to be the electronic version of John Cage, it's quite annoying.
[0, 0 273000( | [line~] | [dac~]
In fact, I'm so against it that I'm going to come up with a parody album with actual good dance music that uses elements of the academic code geek norm with real electronic music that have titles like "computer scientists make for very bad musicians" and "chainsaw in a cave, recorded 6 feet down"
In all seriousness though, i like the science.
However, I believe that just because it's accepted academically doesn't mean that it will put you ahead of everyone else nor do I like/take part in the elitism that follows which is ten times worse.
I read the CCRMA and IRCAM articles/publications, use Max, Csound, ChucK, and all of that jazz. I even read the Pd/Max/Csound/Chuck mailing lists too but I choose to make actual music with those tools.
[1( Make Music | | [0( Read pd list | / |/ | [0.5( Warning: untested!!! (apparently) | / |/ [actual_music~] | [dac~]
I use Renoise for sequencing because it can send open sound control data to the extra stuff, then I multitrack it in whatever DAW I feel like using that day whether it's Pro Tools, Live, Logic, DP, or whatever really. Most of what I make is just normal synthesis stuff, like what you would get out of a synth/workstation anyways but I like the fact that I made what I'm using, or heavily modified it if it was sampled.
An off subjerct example but relative is the guys with modular synthesizers. You can go to youtube and see videos with these guys with big huge multithousand dollar Buchla synthesizers and they make this repetitive crap that sounds like it came from lost in space. Then, they just keep turning knobs and it's the same thing for five minutes. It's like, wtf is that trash nobody is going to listen to that...
The technical ability to program synths is great, and I love people who take the time to be scientific about their sound but to me the whole entire point of music is about being technical with a control present. You can look at all of the great classical composers, marching band composers, composers/musicians on labels and find the same thing. If I was to go to school to study music and electronics, and figured out that I can get a plastic drum, destroy an alarm clock to make a contact microphone, and do some basic signal processing I can do much the same thing then I would be asking serious questions.
I guess for someone who's learning, that stuff is fine but these big institutions who teach music already require one to take proper music courses in primary school yet we find 5 minute 20 hz drones everywhere with some white noise. Are the teachers assigning this stuff? Are they mad? I grew up in a super small area in Washington state and I've never been to college so I wouldn't know but what comes out of this circle is baffling.
Perhaps it was just the way I was musically brought up, I don't know. I had a crazy band teacher in primary school who would flunk you if you didn't show up to any of the performances, and dock your grade if you didn't practice so many hours a week that had to be logged and signed by a parent. Plus, you had all the standard music theory stuff, tests on melodic, chromatic, harmonic scales, sometimes the odd ones too, inversions, chords, and so forth. My mom would listen to Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bluegrass music which in my opinion is very technical. I was into house and dance when I was in my preteens to late teens and my mother used to always say that stuff isn't music because it repeats too much. Eventually I saw her wisdom and started listening to lots of Prog Rock and Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Industrial Metal, and stuff like that and it totally changed my view.
I think it's all too easy to get caught up in the technology behind production, and leave the good stuff out. Most of the stuff, including my own that's made with computers just doesn't have that same feel even after I spent 8 hours programming complex drum patterns note by note in a numeric based step sequencer.
However, in my case my own musical control would be the simple math that makes up harmony and melody. Some however can defy this and still make good music, like Sonic Youth for instance or other people who have experimental music actually published on a reputable experimental label. There's still structure there, what is up with this other post-modernist stuff?
Shouldn't artistic enrichment be the goal? Did I miss the boat?
To me, music is controlled noise. You can make a math equation based on chaos theory and apply it to a sequence, but then it becomes noise. You can destroy all sense of scale and timing, but then it becomes noise.
I mean, i can sit there on a synth patch and make noise for 8 hours or I could just go write a song.
Personally, I'll choose to write the song.
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One of the best replies ever on this list. Kudos Jonathan.
On 30 January 2011 04:17, Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com wrote:
--- On Sat, 1/29/11, Josh Moore kh405.7h30ry@gmail.com wrote:
The people involved try too hard to be the electronic version of John Cage, it's quite annoying.
[0, 0 273000( | [line~] | [dac~]
lol
Obvious troll. Send him to SIberia for re-education, let him make the same stupid, halfway mainstream, commercially-aspiring, completely boring "intelligent" dance music that every other Ableton Live user might make and leave the rest of us alone.
D.
Dude,
you should just get yourself a blog, stick this in and develop your net indentity from there. If it will build up quite well you might get respect but for now really just DON'T go off-topic in such obscure fashion, PLEASE!
There is youtube and twitter and all that for this things, here it's more of a spamish kind, since you are nobody and have shown nothing but made clown of yourself. Take it easy, dude.
Cheers,
Ilya
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beatthefinalboss＠gmail.com -
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Ilya D -
Jonathan Wilkes -
Josh Moore -
Mario -
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Phil Stone -
Ricardo Lameiro -
ypatios