All is not Gold

One of the aspects of music that I think I continue to learn each and every day is that not everything that can be done should be done. I just watched a video tonight of someone using his arm as a drum by tapping his fingers on it. I don't post it here because I am trying to be kind but my response to this video is why? Ultimately the test for any music is in the hearing right? OK, I admit that sometimes I am expressing certain concepts in my music and it might help to know what those are but even in these songs I ultimately want them to stand on their own. I guess my point is that I should not need a video to understand what I hear and what I heard with the finger tapping sounded like a cheap $10 DIY drum machine.

Again, if I point the finger at myself I admit that what I do is experimental. But I hope that I seek something of value musically. This is all subjective but my point is that all music and especially experimental music and instruments require a great deal of discernment and refinement. In other words, just because someone can do something, in many cases they would be better of not wasting there time if it's not liiely to yield some musically useful results.

I will leave it at that until the next blog when I talk about an experimental music that does work - The Korg Wavedrum.

Through the Auto Tune Looking Glass

Lately, I have been hearing a lot about auto tune. Rachelle Norman (a board certified music therapist) recently sent me an article in "Slate" by Jonah Weiner on Ke$ha's use of autotune:

http://www.slate.com/id/2276924/?from=rss

And I also listened to a discussion of autotune's and Melodyne's pros and cons in this recent interview on Sonic State of Tara Busch, Maf Lewis and others. Sideline: some great new music from Tara as well (analogue/Moog goodness):

http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2010/12/09/podcast-sonic-talk-200-tara-busch-live/

I believe that Ke$ha's use of autotune is, like so many other dreadfull applications of it, a gimmick. No doubt her hard edge and dance beat are also just formulas for effective marketing but not necessarily good music. I find it often difficult to distinguish between what is commercial and what is jingle. Weiner talks about "ear worms" in his article. I suppose in many ways that writing jingles or songs that attempt to use the same technique as jingles or commercials is a kind of art form but it is not what I would call creative.

So let me get to the looking glass. Many forms of music make effective use of pitch bending as an often very effective form of musical expression. Consider for example Celtic music that often bends up to create a distinctive style along with the scales that are used. I have used this technique in my music by simply bending the pitch wheel down before playing the note and bending up.

On the side of American musical art forms, blues not only uses pitch bending but also has a note specifically called the "blues note" that is especially appropriate to bend. Delta blues also makes use of the cordican bottle or slide and many old school country music band use the steel slide guitar. This same slid guitar is also effectively used in Rock (with a bit of distortion added) by David Gilmour in some Pink Floyd songs and by Led Zepplin and of course, the Alman Borther band to name just a few. There are many many others. Also consider the use of vibrato for violin in classical music and also for guitar in many genres of music.

Pitch bend also is used almost subliminally by vocal artists from R&B to rock but also more subtly by artists like Bob Dylan who developed an enormously popular style partially because of his use of pitch bend in his voice.

The changing pitch of birdsong had been used to wonder effect by composers like Olivier Messiaen spent an incredible amount of time carefully and artistically transposing birdsong.

Pitch is also instrumental in human language which is neurologically related to music in th brain. Many eastern languages such as Mandarin use pitch as part of changing the meaning of a word but in just about any language used changes in pitch to convey meaning.

My point is that the desire to quantize pitch seems to contrary to what so many spend their lives perfecting in music be it voice or an instrument. We put pitch bend wheels on synthesizers and violins and some basses have no frets so avoid quantization. With the invention of drum machines it also seems that everyone wants to quantize time. Sure there is groove quantize but isn't that just another form of quantization?

I understand the purpose of Melodyne to make minor corrections to pitch to put the finishing touches on a mix but the idea that a quantized voice is desirable when it seems to be so much of the art of music thrives on playing outside the grid lines. Why so many want to autotune leaves me without a clue unless it really is just a gimmick.

So, as I have said on Twitter, I hope autotune dies a quick death. For those who like it, don't worry, someone will fnd a new gimmick to sell. In the meantime others will play there notes off the grid lines and through the looking glass.

On Gestures, Kinekt and Beyoind

There has been a great deal of excitement lately about the Kinect video game console. This console uses the motions of the human body rather than a Wii controller or something like it to control a virtual video game world. Many have naturally thought about its adaptation as a musical controller. I will hold off my applause for a while but I wanted to express a few concerns.

One application would be a kind of 3D theremin. The idea would basically be to map parameters representing 3D space to synthesizer parameters. That's fine and a marginal advancement over the theremin but I would not really call it groundbreaking. An example of what I do find at least a little ground breaking is the Eigenharp. It's still simply parameter mapping but there is a very fine degree of control over the controllers on each pad not to mention the 2D array. Many I have discussed this new technology with have likened it to being an instrument rather than a controller. I agree. Any thing I have seen for Kinect places it more as a controller. That's ok, but its not groundbreaking IMHO.

So what would be? I believe that controllers will truly break ground when they move from controller to gestural controller. What do I mean by that? Simple. We all use gestures. We first use them when we learn to speak. Our own body had a very complex synthesizer built right in. A voice box that acts as an oscillator and our throat, mouth, tongue and lips that all act as filters and our muscles which control these as modulators. But rather than thinking about position in space (the current paradigm be it kinect, Roland D-beam, theremn, ect), all of these are defined by morphology. Confused, ok. Morphology is just a way of describing how something changes over time. This is why I am interested, fascinated even memorized by developments studying the brain. The brain does not think in terms of coordinates in space. When someone for example extends their hand to use we don't start to think, ok, what is the coordinates of their hand. No! We see gesture. The position of the hand, the open hand, the extension of the hand to the other person, a smile, the direction of our eyes, all of these gestures get processed by our brains and our brains interpret them as a handshake.

Now here is the trick, moving beyond coordinates to gesture. Apple has done this a bit with there computers and I even have a Sony Vaio that interprets two quick finger pats on the mouse pad as a mouse click. Now consider a conductor and how, without using any physical device other than a conductors wand, is able to communicate to the orchestra musical information.

This is my criticism of Kinect as a musical controller. I don't see it moving beyond an XYZ controller (yawn) because to interpret gesture takes a very quick computer and some very sophisticated programmers. Do I think we will get there? Sure and Buchla already has done this with with the Buchla Lighening which is a rudimentary gestural controller albiet at a high price. My problem with Buchla is that they want someone to invest a lot of money in a product without even having a manual or sufficient demos to look at first. The demos that are out there really don't explain the gestural interpretation engine and frankly some of them look more like the motions of an escaped mental patient than a musician.

Anyway, I have bright hopes for the future but is Kinect the answer? I don't think so but as I said, I will at least partially suspend my judgement.

Presets and Performances

A comment today from a Twitter friend got me thinking. He said that he did not like presets because they limited his creativity. I guess I can see where that might be true but in many ways, I am moving in a very different creative direction.

First, let me explain how I write music. First, I get an idea and then, I think of the synthesizers I could use to create it. Then I start programming by working with an existing preset and tweaking it or in some cases, developing and idea from scratch. Then I record one layer and repeat the process.

My compositions are often not complex horizontally. What I mean by this is that they are not long and have a lot of part to them. This is fact is my greatest self criticism and is what is going to get me to the presets and beyond.

Once of the reasons that I don't have a lot of parts to a composition is that it's hard to see the whole. I think the reason is that I have to break everything up. I am not playing it at the same time. So is this even possible. Yes, I think so. One way is to use presets and to change them with my feet. This way I can go from one movement to the next. I even want to use a Switchblade matrix router so that I can even change things like effects routing paths on the fly. I also want bass pedals so I can play bass with my feet much like an organists.

So my two paradigms that I am using to create a different type of studio are based on the pipe organ and the other based on the Orchestra. In many ways, these are the same things. But think of a symphony for a moment. A composer can change directions from one measure to the next simply by using different instruments in a different way. Now of course, the composer is not doing this in real time but imagine he/she could. With the type of electronic instruments we have today it's possible to perform works in real time.

It got a whole lot from listening to another Twitter friend, Mark Mosher, at the Electro Music festival for 2010 who was able to perform his works in real time by using various controllers and Ableton Live. The whole experience got me out of the paradigm I used before of piecing music together.

Now a pipe organ fits the paradigm as well. An organ can change while its being placed with stops.

So I now see composition as setting up a performance space and then using this space to create a composition in real time without stopping. Different settings of synths can be programmed to controllers and different presets also programmed and changed using foot switches or buttons.

So that is the direction I am going in. I just wanted to throw it out there and hopefully get a few comments back. I would very much appreciate responses.

Which comes first, the genre or the music?

Those who know my musical tastes will know that I am not one to limit myself to one particular musical genres. While I write ambient and experimental music, I have a great affinity to listing to and studying the greats of jazz and classical. These two genres stand at rather opposite ends of apporaches to music or at least until the 20th century regarding classical.

Classical music has always taken a certain pride in its rigor. To be a great classical musician and/or composer, one must spend countless hours studying and playing the music of the greats and understanding the music theory behind their works. At first, classical music was very constrained and fell within fairly narrow parameters. If one was to be a master, one has to work within the narrow guidelines but also do so with creativity. Of course, this was more than possible and the greats such as Bach created created musical works that followed the well worn path of the music that had some before with its limitations but also its possiblities for great expression and beauty.

As classical music progressed, the rules became less important and creativity seemed to flourish as composers and musicians found new musical territory to explore. This culminated in the early 20th century with composers like John Cage who broke completely with tradition. Rather than following the past, he challenged it.

The 20th century avant guarde is also very much tied to the advent of electronic instruments. As technology offered hope for the future, composers like Karlheintz Stockhausen saw entire realms of unexplored electronic methods to create sounds that had never been heard. Early electronic music became the age not of organized notes that conformed to musical standards as in Bach's time but a brave new word of the Pierre Boulez coined "organized sound".

As jazz was using melodies and chords to provide broad harmonic constructs of expression, so to, electronics provided a means of expression. The line between composer and scientists seemed to blur. Artists like Stockhausen where asking questions of "what if" perhaps hoping to pave the way to some new synthesis of sounds that would be the pallet for an new age of music expanded far beyond the limitations of traditional instruments.

With the advent of the Moog Modular Synthesizer and Buchla's electronic music system and electronic music box, the ability to create complex electronic voices was now possible with a bit of a learning curve to climb and money to invest. At first, synthesizers were large the purview of universities and therefore, the use of these instruments stayed well within the confines of a carefully studied academic approach.

But Bob Moog did not want the synthesizer to remain locked in the ivory towers so he made a cheaper and more accessible instrument. This much smaller synthesizer was called a Minimoog. The Minimoog could easily be used on stage and it was for hundreds of bands. The Minimoog and a plethora of synthesizers that followed after.

But as music became accessible it left the ivory tower and moved to the recording studio. Electronic music had entered mainstream pop. Now pop music was not dictated by well footnoted treatises on the experimental wanderings of a Buchla Music Box but rather dollar signs. The more one could crank out hit album after hit album, the more dollars one could make but not just the musicians but the producer. So the pressure was put on putting the genre before the music. Music moved from the experimental seeking a genre to a genre that defined musicians and in many ways, limited their creative choices.

For a while, progressive rock found some bolder territory where they could both make hit records but also do something experimental and artistic but soon, following the leader seemed to dominate especially when the age of low cost computer memory made samples all the rage even to this day. Samples defined a game of musical follower the leader and soon, each time a new sound was used, it became all the rage for a new set of copy cat songs. And electronic music, that held the hope of exploring entire new musical universes, was dominated by sample driven music.

Now that is not the whole story and it was my pleasure in going to the 2010 Electro Music Fest to see that he age of experimentation is alive and well. Many web sites now provide music on the internet which reach into a much broader scope. The music appears to be leading the gerne again and this story is far from being over. In fact, now that someone can make quality recordings at home and then sell them on the internet makes the influence of the sample peddler/bankers far from the only game in town.

So where do we go from here? Will music now lead the way rather than the genre. How often are genres defined by someone simply doing something and the rest following. What is a genre other than a self imposed copying of someone's style with the hopes to be creative enough to break out of the box at least a bit. But then we have the new avant guarde. The musicians who value creativity more than copying the crowd.

But now I come to a dilemma. I was going to post a video of a musician flailing around with Buchla Lightening rods. It was not the carefully crafted sounds of someone like a Morton Subotnick who has learned to master the Buchla Music box and take listeners to another world. No, it was someone who at least seemed to me to have little musical experience and spent a large sum of money on Buchla Lightening. Now granted, some other videos were more musical than this poor example but the one I am thinking of, was nothing more than a child playing on a toy drum. I did not post it because I am not trying to disparage anyone in particular but to merely point out a problem.

I find it myself when I have a wealth of ways to make music and find myself lost in possibilities. I myself do have some musical training and I have found that those musicians who have some training themselves often make better music than those musicans who resemble more the flailing musician with lighting rods in the video I am talking about.

Experimental music is always as risk, when it puts the music before the genre and in doing to gets lost in a sea of possibilities. The music should come before the genre but in a thoughtful and skilled way. I am not suggesting that we either follow the way of mass produced pop music or the rigor of the Baroque period with its well crafted fugues but I am suggesting that we talk about music that is being created and try to learn some skills that will help the better experiments to begin to forms into genres or perhaps better said, musical paths that show promise. I myself would rather try to focus on a few genres that I create and learn how to explore them with some skill and forethought than to drown in a sea of the latest gadgets and believe me, I am very guilty of that. Perhaps, at least for a time, I want to go deeper instead o broader and try to find something lasting and worthwhile creating, even if it does mean I have to spend some time practicing and really learning how to use the wonderful instruments that I have that make those wonderful sounds. Perhaps, learning to use what I have will become the contraints that define a deeper creativity born of skill rather than drowning in the possiblities.

Tear Down the Wall

I never got to know my great grandmother in person because by the time I was born, she had already passed away. But my father has told me stories about her. Like many of the Irish who lived in Boston at the time, she did not really have even two dimes to rub together but one of her great sources of entertainment and enlightenment was to go to the local library and bring back a stack of books that she would then devour over the week and return the next week for another stack. I have little doubt that if she went to a University and mingled with the whose who walked the hallowed halls of the ivory tower, she would have found a group of her peers even though her small Boston apartment was never adorned with a diploma from one of the great higher learning institutions.

Now I understand that people with degrees often find a ready group of people that can relate to them and that different intellectual disciplines often develop their own vocabulary and knowledge of advancements in the field. I do the same with music. Now mind you I have no degree in music (I have degrees however), but I have learned from experience, a lot of hand on practical experience and a have done a lot of reading and talking to people in the field about many things about synthesizers. With people I often talk to on Twitter for example, I can talk about the VCS3, VCOs and VCAs and most will know exactly what these things are. They know who EMS is and Robert Moog and Donald Buchla. All this is natural and good.

However, I am always open to learning something new. I like my grandmother, am not so interested in getting a nice new piece of paper on my wall but rather, getting a new stack of books (in my case often put in my own bookcases) and read and learn. Or to sit in front of a soft synth or a hard synth and play music. Music that speaks to my heart and I want to share with others.

IMHO (degrees or no), we can all learn from one another and frankly, if someone has a degree or not, I don't really care. It's why I rarely share what diplomas I have. My great grandmother did not have any degrees from higher learning institutions as I do but I would rather go back in time and be able to spend an hour with her than with the great minds of the universities. She had a practical knowledge that I think the world is losing. The Irish are some of the greatest writers because they learned the art of poetry, music and story telling by sharing it with their friends at the local pub. They learned to paint with words and notes not because they had a degree but from telling stories and playing music.

I posed a tweet the other night about the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which is, as I said, not really about either zen or motorcycles but has a lot to say about metaphysics. I know, not a word that you hear discussed much these days although I bet my great grandmother knew what it is. Metaphysics is the study of being, of what something is, the underlying essence of things.

The academic mind tends to break things down into small pieces so that each knows their own piece but often not the whole and so they only see the trees and not he forest. They see a drop of water and not the ocean or even the world of life that can exists in a single drop of water from that ocean. A person can only know something by knowing it from all sides and then, putting it all together and then, and only then, understand it's essence. I will tell you my take on music and the brain. That is why so many parts of the brain light up when music is being played.

Music can also be seen from many directions. It is theory, notes and scales and tempos and the like. But it is also emotion and mystery. It speaks both in conterpoint but also of sadness and longing or the joy of summers day. It speaks a language all its own. I can approach music from the perspective of neurology, psycho acoustics, psychology, music theory, electronics even physics. Each can tell me something but none on their own capture the essence.

When I allude to the Carolian rabbit hole, I am trying to invite people down a hole that will show them a world below the surface of academic disciplines that they seem to cling to with such fervor. One of the reasons I love the first Matrix movie (the 1st, the writers kind of blew it after that) is that we each live in our own matrix. We have a vocabulary that we may share with a particular group of people, or knowledge, or experience. And like the movie, it's ok sometimes to enjoy taste of the steak, but there is more to the human experience than that and to experience it, we have to leave our matrix.

We hold up our degrees and believe that only those in our small circle have something to say or contribute to our jobs and our life but the truth is, in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway ways and tenement halls". Perhaps, we have only to listen and the silence will speak to us.

Do Sounds Have Meaning?

I just listened to this great interview with John Cage again:

In this interview, Cage claims that sound has no meaning.

I think the question as to if sound has meaning or not relates to the very old philosophical question that if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound. If the meaning of sound is that the molecules in the air vibrate when it falls then yes, it makes a sound. If one where to leave a recording device in the forest when the tree fell it would also produce a recording of those vibrations. But if one means by sound what we associate sound with in language, our experience of the sensation of sound, then no, the tree does not make any sound.

It is impossible for us to hear a sound the way a recording device records it. Each time we hear a sound our brains not only filter it, but try to make sense of it. There is a psychological theory refered to as pareidolia