Re:Brian's posts

Hi Brian

I've decided on a simple method of dealing with your posts.

I look at the first paragraph, and if it contains polemic,
skip it and move on to the next post.

I know you often have some with mild polemic anyway, so when
it is a kind of general gringe about something I'll
keep going, but as soon as it gets personal or
mentions atrocities I'll stop.

Some of them rather drag you in with the entertaining
writing style and as someone said you might be a good
writer of fiction for entertainment.

But, it's not really such a good style for "fact".

Your other posts are extremely valuable and worth
reading.

I'm sorry to have read the post where you mentioned
Joe Monzo's girlfriend, and I think it would be
great if you were to apologise to him about it,
and to her too for that matter.

I didn't read the second post you did about him,
having decided on this policy by then.

I'll surely miss useful and interesting material,
but prefer it this way!

Robert

Just a few general points...

() Great list.

() Where are all the files McLaren keeps talking about? He
mentions stuff with 53 equal, stuff from "a hard night...",
something about a chaconne, none of which seem to be in the
"Files" section. I probably missed a crucial post. Can
anyone point me in the right direction?

() Between McLaren and JdL: "preference" is not a scientific
quantity in this context. The best experiments in psychology
are seldom able to give insight into "preference", and all of
the musicological studies I've seen cited which claim to do so
are absolutely laughable. So, John probably shouldn't have
said what McLaren claims he said. However, in John's defense
I will claim that:

() I can hear the difference between John's retuned
sequences and their original tunings, and I like
the retunings very much, and I am not the only
such person.

() If you play people, whatever age and nationality,
different chords (with any normal musical timbre you
like) and ask them to remember the chords, and quiz
them later, they will identify the ones approximating
just ratios with greater accuracy than the rest. If
you give people a tunable pitch generator (oscillator,
monochord, etc.) and ask them to tune certain intervals,
their accuracy will be much better when the target is
near a just interval, for normal musical timbres.

McLaren may predictably respond that 99.44% of timbres
in the universe are not harmonic. So what? Non-harmonic
timbres do not convey an un-ambiguous sense of pitch, and
are seldom the primary ingredients for the type of music
most of us are out to make. On-the-fence timbres such as
used by Sethares are non-existent in nature, and are as
bad at conveying pitch as they may be said to be non-
harmonic, in my experience. McLaren's claim that harmonic
timbres are not to be found in nature is nonsense --
almost perfect harmonic spectra can easily be found in
the human voice, bowed strings, brass, reeds. A great
coincidence, surely, that this is a nearly exhaustive list
of ingredients for an orchestra. Percussion the
exception, they are usually tuned only very roughly, or
not at all.

McLaren may predictably respond that playing intervals
for people in a lab supplies us with no insight into
music. There is truth to this. I will claim, however,
that it requires substantially more training for
listeners to distinguish between, say, different works of
atonal serialism than it does for them to distinguish
different works of common practice music. I will claim
that people have better success, in general, extracting
parts from music made mostly of just intervals than from
music made mostly of non-just intervals. I will claim
that arguably the most successful music in history
(western common-practice music) has been made, to an
astounding extent, of just intervals.

() Between McLaren and Monz. Joe, your midi files are great.
Brian, midi files are a great way to distribute music, and I
haven't heard Joe using any of the excuses you mention when
people don't like his stuff.

You both make very interesting music. Monz, your ideas are
underdeveloped, and your output too small. McLaren, your
ideas are random, and your output too large. McLaren, if
you are willing to submit your work as an entry in the genre
of experimental electronic music, then it may safely be
considered a definitive mastery. Experimental electronic music
generally sucks, though, and if for whatever reason you are
unwilling to accept this as your genre, you must face the fact
that your opinion of your work may indeed be the highest one
around. I'm in much the same position with my own work, and
I do accept it, but I don't make a habit of blasting other
people's work to their face.

Of whatever else Brian says about Monz, I have no way to access
the truth. I certainly don't see Brian's post as spiteful,
though, and I do not see a basis for Robert Walker's suggestion
of an apology. If somebody thinks I have an internet addiction,
I'd expect them to tell me. In public? Well, maybe Brian has
an addiction to sociopathy. I'm probably in that boat too.

-Carl

> <<Brian, midi files are a great way to distribute music,>>
>
> Just my opinion of course, but general midi files are probably the
> absolute worst way I've ever heard to distribute music -- just
> horrible.

Not as a sole means of distribution, or for the general public.
But for a group like this they're great.

They are small to transfer and store, and they function as somewhat
of a score -- even as a good score if the composer was careful. In
some ways they even sound better than mp3. Psychoacoustic
masking, the silent killer... Seriously, the hollow-sounding, high-
frequency cutting, subsonically distorted 128Kbps mp3 does real
damage to listening.

We all know that timbre is important to music, but consider...

() What if the composer works in General MIDI? There's a good
chance you'll get very close to what he intended. To do better,
the composer can reference a popular piece of hardware or a
sound font.

() Good listeners should be able to hear the notes, and judge
just the notes.

() The listener can even change the timbres until they suit!

> I was recently reading a review of Steven Spielberg's recent film
> "A.I.", and in the review Spielberg's prolific output was
> contrasted with Stanley Kubrick's rather stingy one by noting that
> speed is often the enemy of art. This is a sentiment that rings
> true for me as well... not always, but more often than not.

I'm not sure. Kubrick was about a prolific in his time as
Spielberg, he just burned out. If anything, a lack of speed
killed AI and Eyes Wide Shut -- Kubrick spent 20 years on them.

Spielberg's problem is his manipulation of his audience. All the
little movie moments put into every film... the smiles, the sighs...
Kubrick just presents a thing and let's his audience judge. His
formula is simple: find a great story, depict it with brilliant
visual art, while playing proven classical music in the background.
A vertical approach, Kubrick is a visual artist. Spielberg works
horizontally -- a one-man Disney using live actors. AI was an
abomination.

> Art is in the details, the care that one takes in stamping that
> thing as their own... expediency runs in the exact opposite
> direction, and midi is expedience personified.

Sorry to be so contrary, but MIDI is no such thing. Like anything
else, doing it right takes time. To get expression while keeping
your score intact is incredibly difficult. So much so, I'll
wager fewer than 1% of authors bother.

-Carl