Sharing Music and Other Real Listening Problems

I was invited to comment a few years back about music piracy by the
American Music Center and the core of my argument rings in this
discussion.

How can we be worried about stealing when we're not even getting
listens?

Replace "stealing" with "file formats" above.

I'll add another potentially inflammatory comment, I think that an
even greater impediment to the acceptance of microtuning, is the use
of crap synthesizer realizations. I could barely get through Daniel's
recent 22ET improvisations. Gene's Ostinato piece, is barely
listenable with its timbres. My recent piano piece was dissed for a
bad piano setting.

We've got real problems, people, in that we're dependant on bad
synthetic realizations to get our musical point across. How do we fix
that? I only have so much time in the world to tweak patches, and I
spent a bit of time looking for a more electronic sounding patch to
make my piece at least an electronic work.

But geez... the file formats suck. The realizations suck. Our music
rocks. If we're interested in getting the serious music world to open
up to our newness we'd better get all our acts together and I'm not
sure what the solution is. (Although I am sure, I'm not going to
adopt OGG. Hehe...).

Is microtuning doomed to an existence as a bad MIDI realization or
weak, pablum soft-synth realizations forever?

jeff harrington
http://jeffharrington.org - new music
http://netnewmusic.net - new music portal
http://beepsnort.org - new music blog

idealordid wrote:

> I was invited to comment a few years back about music piracy by the
> American Music Center and the core of my argument rings in this
> discussion. >
> How can we be worried about stealing when we're not even getting
> listens? >
> Replace "stealing" with "file formats" above. >
> I'll add another potentially inflammatory comment, I think that an
> even greater impediment to the acceptance of microtuning, is the use
> of crap synthesizer realizations. I could barely get through Daniel's
> recent 22ET improvisations. Gene's Ostinato piece, is barely
> listenable with its timbres. My recent piano piece was dissed for a
> bad piano setting. >

As far as I am concerned, when I post something to a forum like this, it's just an example, like a fragment of notation from a harmony textbook. I make my living putting scores in the hands of players, and it's the sounds that they produce that constitute my work. I use midi and sound files to illustrate aspects of my work, and often only work-in-progress, not the work itself (that's one reason why I prefer closed forums). The focus here is on tuning, and I invest the small amount of time that I can afford on getting the tuning right, if sometimes ridiculously so, and this is knowingly at the expense of getting the timbre, dynamics, tempi, rubati, articulations, etc. right. But above and beyond that, I don't know what the hell an acceptable midi or sound file is supposed to be like. I am very suspicious of the present tendency to evaluate electronic music on the basis of verisimilude to known instruments and the habits of human players. Two of my teachers (Mumma, Lucier) are real pioneers in electronic music, and such a standard is certainly irrelevant to their work. One of the advantages of the electronic media would seem to be the ability to get extreme accuracy in several domains, but the direction nowadays seems to be anything but that. I'd rather have an electronic music that does what electronics do well rather than poorly imitate what real players haphazardly. (Lucier's combinations of sine wave oscillators and instruments or voices is my model here). Above and beyond _that_, I suspect that you'll never come to a reasonable consensus about electronic realisations. I've poured days into making a sound font that fits a particular tuning, half the audience hates it, the other half doesn't notice. I've taken an instrument straight from an out-of-the-box computer, half the audience loves it, the other doesn't notice... I can't detect any patter here, just my intuition that I could invest a lot more in sampling and face only ever-diminishing returns on that investment.

I'd hope here at MMM that unless the realisation gets _completely_ in the way of hearing the tuning being demonstrated, the discussion would stay focused on the tuning, and suggestions for improving the realisation can take a back channel. DJW

By the way, my 22tet stuff is not really an improvisation, it's a string of sketches, notated on the screen in Finale. I don't use the midi-keyboard (the one I have is way too small for my hands) for notating, I only use it to trigger events when I do live performances with PD.

My (final) thoughts on all of this:

*Newer things tend to receive much more resistance and skepticism than do
entrenched 'ubiquitous' things.

*When someone suggests that what you are doing with non-12-equal based tunings
is ridiculous (or strange, or scratch their head or raise an eyebrow), think
about how infuriating that is. We know what a rich world we all have, we, the
brave, who chose to go down the "road less travelled".

*Oggs are really becoming more popular, so the analogy is weak anyway. But
weak analogy or not, they are the "road less travelled". And they sound
better. Hopefully, they will soon be the format of choice. Or, they will
become LISP to mp3's JAVA.

*I stand for promoting the good over the ubiquitous. The good needs all the
help it can get over the ubiquitous. So, let's compare the sound of of ogg
and mp3, and come to some conclusions.

*The only reason Ogg will not win is the skepticism of the new. This
skepticism boils down to lazyness and fear of losing comfort regarding
change, ultimately. Ogg files are like hybrid cars--we all know its the right
thing to do, but only 1 out of 5 people do it. But we *do* have the power to
change the demand, and industry does have the power to mandate change by just
making less of what it wants to and more of what it wants to. So, we send a
message every time we choose to download Ogg-capable software, and spend the
5 minutes it takes to do so.

*The nice thing about Ogg is that it wasn't industry greed driving it. It was
smart hacker types saying "fuck you and your patent, we can make a better
sounding format and make it free for all". That's the *real* America to
me !!!

*This "fuck the common" thing resonates with me. Otherwise, I'd be writing in
12-equal exclusively.

*Yes, most synthetic out-of-the-box factory preset sounds suck. But IMO, Wendy
Carlos is proof that one can make patches that sound good. So I would say
"don't use factory presets", or "roll your own" ;)

Cheers,
Aaron.

On Friday 24 September 2004 08:17 am, idealordid wrote:
> I was invited to comment a few years back about music piracy by the
> American Music Center and the core of my argument rings in this
> discussion.
>
> How can we be worried about stealing when we're not even getting
> listens?
>
> Replace "stealing" with "file formats" above.
>
> I'll add another potentially inflammatory comment, I think that an
> even greater impediment to the acceptance of microtuning, is the use
> of crap synthesizer realizations. I could barely get through Daniel's
> recent 22ET improvisations. Gene's Ostinato piece, is barely
> listenable with its timbres. My recent piano piece was dissed for a
> bad piano setting.
>
> We've got real problems, people, in that we're dependant on bad
> synthetic realizations to get our musical point across. How do we fix
> that? I only have so much time in the world to tweak patches, and I
> spent a bit of time looking for a more electronic sounding patch to
> make my piece at least an electronic work.
>
> But geez... the file formats suck. The realizations suck. Our music
> rocks. If we're interested in getting the serious music world to open
> up to our newness we'd better get all our acts together and I'm not
> sure what the solution is. (Although I am sure, I'm not going to
> adopt OGG. Hehe...).
>
> Is microtuning doomed to an existence as a bad MIDI realization or
> weak, pablum soft-synth realizations forever?
>
> jeff harrington
> http://jeffharrington.org - new music
> http://netnewmusic.net - new music portal
> http://beepsnort.org - new music blog
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

--
Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.dividebypi.com

Morning Aaron!

{you wrote...}
>*Newer things tend to receive much more resistance and skepticism than do
>entrenched 'ubiquitous' things.

And a lot of other things that are very salient points. I'd only ask this: in your zeal to promote a format like ogg, are you perfectly ok with any loss in audience you might incur?

>*I stand for promoting the good over the ubiquitous. The good needs all the
>help it can get over the ubiquitous. So, let's compare the sound of of ogg
>and mp3, and come to some conclusions.

My compressed files never stand for anything beyond being a proxy for the real recording. Even the ogg files don't sound as good, so they are simply representations for example purposes. Maybe it is just (the majority of) my music that doesn't suffer enough in an mp3/ogg comparison that I've felt compelled to adopt a less common format.

>*The only reason Ogg will not win is the skepticism of the new. This >skepticism boils down to lazyness and fear of losing comfort regarding >change, ultimately.

What is your plan for changing human nature? :)

>*The nice thing about Ogg is that it wasn't industry greed driving it.

This one I don't get. I have never paid a dime for using mp3 encoding, and have never paid a royalty on it. No one has ever made a token of currency off of my using mp3 as a format. It is as benign, in my usage, as ogg.

MSoft *did* make money off my use of MS Office, and thankfully now I can use OpenOffice, the open source alternative. And I do.

Cheers,
Jon

On Friday 24 September 2004 10:39 am, Jonathan M. Szanto wrote:
> Morning Aaron!
>
> {you wrote...}
>
> >*Newer things tend to receive much more resistance and skepticism than do
> >entrenched 'ubiquitous' things.
>
> And a lot of other things that are very salient points. I'd only ask this:
> in your zeal to promote a format like ogg, are you perfectly ok with any
> loss in audience you might incur?

No. I want to encourage ogg at the same time as I offer mp3 for the very
excellent reasons you have mentioned. I *really* do think, however, that it's
a kind of myopic lazyness (although in some cases, compatibility issues come
into play perhaps) that would prevent someone from installing tools that
allow them to experience a format that is growing in popularity and has
arguably better quality.

> >*I stand for promoting the good over the ubiquitous. The good needs all
> > the help it can get over the ubiquitous. So, let's compare the sound of
> > of ogg and mp3, and come to some conclusions.
>
> My compressed files never stand for anything beyond being a proxy for the
> real recording. Even the ogg files don't sound as good, so they are simply
> representations for example purposes. Maybe it is just (the majority of) my
> music that doesn't suffer enough in an mp3/ogg comparison that I've felt
> compelled to adopt a less common format.

That's fair. I *would* say that my excellent ears hear very little difference
between any audio file formats at all when the quality threshold is high
enough. That is to say, I'm not sure I could get 100% on an A/B comparison.

> >*The only reason Ogg will not win is the skepticism of the new. This
> >skepticism boils down to lazyness and fear of losing comfort regarding
> >change, ultimately.
>
> What is your plan for changing human nature? :)

Ridding the world of Republicans? ;)

> >*The nice thing about Ogg is that it wasn't industry greed driving it.
>
> This one I don't get. I have never paid a dime for using mp3 encoding, and
> have never paid a royalty on it. No one has ever made a token of currency
> off of my using mp3 as a format. It is as benign, in my usage, as ogg.

Point taken. It's I suppose, more philosophical than practical.

> MSoft *did* make money off my use of MS Office, and thankfully now I can
> use OpenOffice, the open source alternative. And I do.

Amen. Good man!

Best,
Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.dividebypi.com

on 24/9/04 14:17, idealordid at jeff@... wrote:

> Is microtuning doomed to an existence as a bad MIDI realization or
> weak, pablum soft-synth realizations forever?
>

Good question. Problems such as those you mention made me stop faffing
around with bad synth sounds. The only synth I would recommend is a
softsynth - Native Instruments FM7 - which lends itself to inharmonic
timbres. It's easy to programme and very good for sustained tones.

If one's music is contrapuntal and not too volatile I think synths like FM7
can give a decent "abstract" rendition. Four or more rich evolving lines can
work well. Otherwise I'd take the trouble to get a live instrumental
performance and we all know the problems involved there.

Or build your own...

mopani

Now, an argument not of MP3vs.OGG, but of MIDIvs. hitherto-nonexistant data type. My
apologies for any irrelevance, but I really have nowhere else to turn with this.

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "idealordid" <jeff@p...> wrote:
> Is microtuning doomed to an existence as a bad MIDI realization or
> weak, pablum soft-synth realizations forever?

The core problem is MIDI. As a file format, there are a huge number of things that
standard MIDI files will never be able to do well. And if your softsynth is a slave to MIDI
data, it will be similarly crippled.

There are two less-travelled paths that I see. One is the super-MIDI type of specification
(like ZIPI's MPDL) that allows cool things like microtonality unrestricted by one pitch bend
per note per channel, unheard-of timbral control, and an overall freedom from a
keyboard-biased note-on/note-off model.

Something like this is only found in custom-designed electronic studios (and not the one
at rice). But notice that the size of a better-than-MIDI file would be similarly tiny, and if
the data representation of the music were better thought out than MIDI, I dare say the
musicality of digital realization could improve manyfold. Why doesn't such a thing exist?
The ubiquitousness of MIDI.

Another that I was wondering about is to use some sort of variable-phase vocoder (?) to
store music as a bunch of timed sine waves. Decoding (or encoding?) an existing sound
file with Fourier or someone would be very nasty, but what if...the composing
tool...treated the sound this way? An additive timbre represented by a grouping of
"notes," each turn-offable and pitch-adjustable...a strange marriage of MIDI and audio...

Now, I know I could have my own fun using the advanced things available to me (Kyma!)
but I sure would love to see something like this for the average computer user. If
computers today can run real-time cSound, why not something...more musical? *cringe*
More intuitive? More gooey?

Feel free to point me somewhere where people are doing this; I can't find anywhere.

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Wolf <djwolf1@a...> wrote:

> But above and beyond that, I don't know what the hell an acceptable
midi
> or sound file is supposed to be like. I am very suspicious of the
> present tendency to evaluate electronic music on the basis of
> verisimilude to known instruments and the habits of human players. Two
> of my teachers (Mumma, Lucier) are real pioneers in electronic music,
> and such a standard is certainly irrelevant to their work. One of the
> advantages of the electronic media would seem to be the ability to get
> extreme accuracy in several domains, but the direction nowadays
seems to
> be anything but that.

Csound can easily give the extreme tuning accuray you cite, but so far
I haven't made much use of it. I wonder how the complaints about the
bad quality of sampled sound would compare to the inevitable
complaints about the bad quality of synthesized sound?

> Above and beyond _that_, I suspect that you'll never come to a
> reasonable consensus about electronic realisations. I've poured days
> into making a sound font that fits a particular tuning, half the
> audience hates it, the other half doesn't notice.

Have you ever considered sharing sound fonts in sf2 format?

I've taken an
> instrument straight from an out-of-the-box computer, half the audience
> loves it, the other doesn't notice... I can't detect any patter here,
> just my intuition that I could invest a lot more in sampling and face
> only ever-diminishing returns on that investment.

I've noticed a negative correlation between how hard I work on a piece
and how much musical thinking went into its creation and positive
notice. The piece I worked the hardest on was Bodacious Breed, but
that is hardly a popular favorite, and my attempts to tweak it have
inspired no reaction at all. 45000 Fingers got some positive comments,
but also some negative ones. Both of these are much more involved
creations than simple musical experiments such as Ostinato or
Kotekant, which were far easier to write.

> I'd hope here at MMM that unless the realisation gets _completely_ in
> the way of hearing the tuning being demonstrated, the discussion would
> stay focused on the tuning, and suggestions for improving the
> realisation can take a back channel.

This isn't the tuning list, but the microtonal music list; if the
intent is solely or mostly to demonstrate a tuning idea that list is
at least as appropriate as this one.

Hi Jacob

One solution for making MIdi better for playing pitches already
exists in the midi standard - which is the MTS tuning table sysex which
can be used to set the tuning table for a channel
via midi. That deals with a lot of the tuning issues
if only the MTS standard were more widely supported
by synths and software programs that paly midi.

It lets you tune any of the 127 midi notes to any pitch you
like so completely eliminates the midi retuning one pitch
per channel problems in Mdi. And actually exists within
midi itself, part of the midi spec but seldom implemented.

Some people advocate the .tun table as teh way to go but
that has the disadvantage that there is no way to send a
.tun table via midi so it is only good if you want
to load a tuning into your synth and keep with that
one tuning. It is no good for dynamic real time
retunign where maybe you want to make a midi
file where the tuning changes at bar 7 or
whatever. Or maybe you want channel 1 to play
one tuning and channel 2 to play another.
All that is possible in midi with MTS.

I think programmers seem to favour MTS
but musicians tend to go for .TUN but
if the MTS was suppoted more widely and
better one would see teh value of it.
It allows tuning with double the precision
of midi pitch bends.

I'm interested in your idea of a hibrid
midi / audio as I've actually done some of
thta in FTS in fact. (Fractal Tune Smithy
- the program I wrote to play fractal
music and to retune microtonal music).

I used Midi to make instruments consisting of e.g.
a marimba playing all the pitches of
the harpsichord partials from an
analysis of the spectrume of a harpsichord
note, and that sort ofthing so you get
these interesting morph sounds partway
between e.g. a marimba and a harpsichord.
Fun to do.

This next release of FTS in maybe a week
or a forthnigth from now will hopefully
include CSound too - to let you just select
a C-sound instruent from a drop list just
as you do in midi so eliminating all the
techyness of building an orchestra out of
individiual c-sound instrumetns as FTS
will be able to do all of that for you.

It involves someone making a special
.CSI file which tells FTS how to combine
that particular instrument with other
instruments in an orchestra - but once
that file is made it can then be used
with any other instruments in any order
and with them all in any pan position
just by selecting them from a list.
Then user can also set any optional
parmeters fo rthe instrument.

Since FTS also has this option to make
custom voices made up of combinations
of toher instruemnts, itwill then be
possible, just as you say, to
make an instrument out of any combination
of C-sound instruments stacked up to
build them into a timbre - and of course
one couls use sine waves, or any other C-sound
instrument.

So you could say I'[m working on this at least.
:-). Fairly early days yet but all this
described here is working and I plan to
do a bit more work on it. But I'll then
probably need to ask around and see what
C-Sounders think about it. So far I have
just developed it on my own as an experiment
in FTS. But certainly, it does work -
for most of the C-Sound instruments that
I've tried. Some few don't wrok and I can't
see how to get them to work because the
functions they use can't be seprated out, but
most work just fine, including ones that pass
table numbers and work with them in various
ways and ones that need initialisation
instruments (e.g. drum and stick) and
so on all that works just fine and very
easily indeed.

Robert

Hi Jeff, I totally agree. But my personal opinion is that it's up to
the composer to properly parent all relevant aspects of their music
and that would certainly to my mind include a self-respecting
attention to timbre and tone,etc. So my general rule of thumb when it
comes to presenting a piece is that if it's not good enough it's not
good--period. In my opinion, bad midi realizations are the main
reason this microtonal community is taken lightly by most musicians
who otherwise would seem a perfect fit.

--- In MakeMicoMusic@yahoogroups.com, "idealordid" <jeff@p...> wrote:
> I was invited to comment a few years back about music piracy by the
> American Music Center and the core of my argument rings in this
> discussion.
>
> How can we be worried about stealing when we're not even getting
> listens?
>
> Replace "stealing" with "file formats" above.
>
> I'll add another potentially inflammatory comment, I think that an
> even greater impediment to the acceptance of microtuning, is the use
> of crap synthesizer realizations. I could barely get through
Daniel's
> recent 22ET improvisations. Gene's Ostinato piece, is barely
> listenable with its timbres. My recent piano piece was dissed for a
> bad piano setting.
>
> We've got real problems, people, in that we're dependant on bad
> synthetic realizations to get our musical point across. How do we
fix
> that? I only have so much time in the world to tweak patches, and I
> spent a bit of time looking for a more electronic sounding patch to
> make my piece at least an electronic work.
>
> But geez... the file formats suck. The realizations suck. Our
music
> rocks. If we're interested in getting the serious music world to
open
> up to our newness we'd better get all our acts together and I'm not
> sure what the solution is. (Although I am sure, I'm not going to
> adopt OGG. Hehe...).
>
> Is microtuning doomed to an existence as a bad MIDI realization or
> weak, pablum soft-synth realizations forever?
>
> jeff harrington
> http://jeffharrington.org - new music
> http://netnewmusic.net - new music portal
> http://beepsnort.org - new music blog

Jonathan M. Szanto wrote:

> This one I don't get. I have never paid a dime for using mp3 encoding, and > have never paid a royalty on it. No one has ever made a token of currency > off of my using mp3 as a format. It is as benign, in my usage, as ogg.

Well, congratulations! Judging by this list:

http://www.mp3licensing.com/licensees/index.asp

Sony and Philips have both made money from me for mp3 hardware, and eMusic for the files. I don't know if any of my money went to Microsoft for a sufficiently recent version of Windows.

Anyway, you'll be pleased to hear that I downloaded and compiled Lame myself, so that Mandrakesoft don't have to pay for it on my behalf. A couple more pieces at:

http://x31eq.com/music/

Actually, over a year old, but it looks like they won't be used for the project I made them for. I haven't done anything since :P

Graham

Graham,

{you wrote...}
>Well, congratulations! Judging by this list:
>
>http://www.mp3licensing.com/licensees/index.asp

aha! Well, that simply shows how complex all this is. I can count two companies (Cakewalk and Sonic Foundry) that may have tacked on some small fraction of a percent to their product because of the licensing. It doesn't matter, because I had bought their products before they had mp3 support, and I use them all the time for every *but* mp3 encoding. Does the fraction that I paid get me angry enough that I'd give up the programs and try to find others that came even close, and disrupt years of work flow.

I don't bloody think so!

But that is a great point you bring up, and shows how all these little things find their way into our products. I don't have any answers about all this, but I am still convinced that mp3, as a format, is still going to dominate for a few years. Maybe it will go out when the CD dies as a format.

Well, back to music.

Cheers,
Jon

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Jonathan M. Szanto"
<JSZANTO@A...> wrote:

I am still convinced that mp3, as a format, is still going to
> dominate for a few years. Maybe it will go out when the CD dies as a
format.

Increasing bandwidth and storage capacity work against any lossy
format, which may mean any lossy compression scheme will eventually
become obsolsecent.

{you wrote...}
>... which may mean any lossy compression scheme will eventually become >obsolsecent.

I look forward to that.

>>Well, congratulations! Judging by this list:
>>
>>http://www.mp3licensing.com/licensees/index.asp
>
>aha! Well, that simply shows how complex all this is. I can count two
>companies (Cakewalk and Sonic Foundry) that may have tacked on some
>small fraction of a percent to their product because of the licensing.

They both offer it as a costly extra plug-in, so I can't imagine the
regular retail price bearing any of it in addition.

-Carl