Re: uncheesy sounds and retunability (was: Joseph's new piece--Blect)

--- In MakeMicroMusic@y..., "X. J. Scott" <xjscott@e...> wrote:

/makemicromusic/topicId_unknown.html#2112

> Hey Joe,
>
> Hope you don't mind my jumping in here.
>

****Not at all, Jeff! That's what this forum is for, and it's been
of *immense* value to me even so far.

[Quite possibly I've gotten as much out of *this* Forum as the "Main"
forum... although I have to admit some of my "theoretical" background
came from over there...]

>
> > However, naturally I'm interested in doing something about
> > "cheesy" timbres, if possible, and have been exploring the
> > possibility of at least improving them a bit by *reverb* on
> > *this* list.
>
> Yes, I think FM timbres do well from adding a touch of
> effects.
>
> They also do well when combined with analog timbres
> since they each exist in their own complementary timbre
> space - FM sidebands vs analog harmonic overtones. Can
> get more dense mixes by using different families of
> electronic instruments; it's an orchestration issue.
>
> Cheesy sounds can work well if some spatial movement is
> added to. And just about any cheesy sound becomes
> subtle and expressive if do more with it than play it
> from an on/off switch/keyboard perspective -- vary the
> attack and decay rates during a melody line, subtley
> change the eq settings, etc etc - just about any
> element of the audio path is well served by being
> subsumed (right word?) into the set of available
> *compositional* parameters.
>

****Well, at least I can start with *dynamics!* Embarassingly
enough, I didn't even know how to do that right before! And
reverb... and some more effects once I learn how to do them...

>
> Is it that less people are interested in tuning now
> than 10 years ago? It seems like more are here on the
> net, but the trend in pop music is to use fx processors
> to 'harmonize' live vocals to 12tET, creating an
> unearthly robotic sound. Yuck.

****My guess is that, initially, the engineers *were* interested in
xenharmonics, since, probably many of them, like many of our
math/engineering types on this and the other list who are "into"
music are interested in xenharmonics.

But, then the *marketing* people get in to it and it's "Hey, why add
all this stuff when it costs more... here is our *market* and only a
few "weirdos" want this stuff. Take it out if you still want your
job around here... :)"

Just a guess.

JP