On Tuesday 23 June 2009 09:27:32 Paul Davis wrote: > On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:11 PM, nescivi<nescivi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > To put it the other way round... > > (Which is partly what Paul Davis was also hinting at...) > > You need to have mastered the craft, before you can make art out of it. > > and to amplify *that*, another eno quote: "a good instrument has > properties that the body can learn and the mind cannot". electronic > music control systems until very recently (and even then only in the > context of academic research projects) just have so little sensitivity > and so much requirement for conscious decision making that its really > hard to have the same kind of muscle-memory-based kinesthetic > experience when making sound with them. I don't quite agree with the only in academic research projects. Being around quite a bit in that academic context, I find that some of the best new interfaces (and the ones that are actually performed with) come from artists, who make them theirselves. Michel Waisvisz was one of the pioneers in this field, and was outside of the academic realm; and he was an amazing performer with his instrument The Hands. A friend of mine, Kassen, has made a live sequencing interface, based around an arcade joystick, where he specifically chose to use his trained muscle memory from arcade games for sequencing dancable music. He now thinks of bars in circles, having worked on that instrument for a while. But yes, at times I find it quite frustrating to have to program any sound I make, rather than just play around and find something new. That's why I do have some analog synths lying around, and occasionally, if I have the change to play a piano, I do so (I put some of my (older) piano stuff online by the way; www.nescivi.nl). > so not only do we have the > "golly gee whizz look it goes whiiirrrrrrrr!!!" kind of effect that > you write about, but even when you have moved beyond that, its very > difficult to get into a "tight feedback loop" of physical expression > and consequent sound. It is. Though in my recent work we found that it quite astonishing what people can make, if you give them the right tools to work with. > so much contemporary music is all based entirely > "in the head" because you simply don't need a body to play it - in > some cases, a body *cannot* play it! its not the virtuosic skill that > goes missing - i can live without that. what we lose is the > kinesthetic experience that lends extra meaning, direction and ideas > to a performer/composer's work, even without them being particularly > aware of it. On the other hand, I find it interesting that this split between performer and composer and technician is blurring. A lot of it is "in the head", unfortunately. I've started a little theory (that's what teaching DSP to art students does to you) that you can view the progress of making an artwork like it's in the complex (mathematical) plane: it starts totally imaginary, then it slowly gets a real component, and sometimes it kreeps back to the imaginary again... In the ideal case you end up with a fairly large real component, and just a little bit of imaginary; enough to startle the imagination, but not totally besides the point. sincerely, Marije _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
