[microsound] Electroacoustic techniques

[David Powers]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Batuhan Bozkurt
<batuhan at batuhanbozkurt.com> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
>> I sometimes feel like despite all the advances done with electronic
>> music tools, it is extremely time consuming to do anything nontrivial,
>> involving many hours of set up; whereas I can write something
>> extremely intricate for, say, violin and piano, and get the most
>> incredible palette of sounds by writing a few notes on a piece of
>> paper. I don't understand why it should be so inherently hard to
>> create anything "musical" with electronic means??? I don't feel the
>> need to build my own piano and violin to write for piano and violin,
>> yet I feel like that is what I'm being required to do to compose
>> electronic music.
>
> I don't really think that this is a fair way of looking at this. Writing intricate yet functional things for traditional instruments require years of training. Playing those instruments also require a massive amount of training. Why should composing for and playing with electronic instruments be different in this sense? It is hard for me to play the violin for example, because I am not trained to play that instrument. But I can write some music for violin because I worked on that stuff. It took some years of my life to do that. It would be extremely frustrating for me to do it properly, otherwise. Same goes with electronic instruments. After all, they don't generate musically interesting sounds that fit into a particular composer's intents, automagically.
>

That's a good point... I would say, though, that pop music and
electronic dance producers do get lots of cool automagical tools, so
the real issue is that:
1. Composers aren't really working together towards common goals and
so their needs are highly divergent and
2. The market for composers is simply too small for anything to get
created that caters to the needs of serious composers.

I wonder though, if the musical problems are REALLY so diverse that
composers couldn't work together to create common tools that simplify
some of the grunt work.

>
> I'd suggest an environment agnostic learning approach to sound synthesis first.

Well, I already have done synthesis for many years... the problem is,
as another poster mentioned, how to make the electronics sound
"organic" and have the same type of timbral complexity as the acoustic
sounds... I know Pure Data pretty well actually, though I haven't done
a lot of signal processing with it. The reason I was leaning towards
CSound is that it has some spectral processing possibilities that are
new to me and look promising, and it also has some nice granular
generators... These kinds of operations are rather intensive and
aren't easy to prototype quickly in PD in my experience.

Generally, the difficulty I'm having is connecting my knowledge of
acoustic instruments and composition with my knowledge of synthesis,
so that the electronics don't just sound like some arbitrary crap
stuck on top of the acoustic sounds... I know of very little
information on how to MUSICALLY treat electronic possibilities, almost
everything I've read is purely technical and assumes you will figure
out the musical side on its own. This is a significant problem in my
mind, precisely because it isn't so easy to make digital sounds be
really "musical" outside of more pop genres like minimal house and
techno or ambient.

~David