[microsound] Electroacoustic techniques

[Justin Glenn Smith]

David Powers wrote:
> 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.
> 

Part of the problem, I think, is that you are reifying musicality here. When those pop folks started using electronic sound sources those sounds were heard differently than they are today. People saw techno and ambient in the early years as cold, threatening, detached, inhuman. Now they are more likely than before to see it as lively, exuberant, joyous, contemplative, relaxing. The sounds have not changed so much as the familiarity of sounds to the audience; that familiarity is what lead to the sounds becoming musical ones. Thus the fetishization of particular familiar early pieces of equipment like the 808 drum machine and moog synths.

In order to MUSICALLY treat electronic possibilities, I think that it is necessary to find out what music becomes in the face of the electronic possibilities - treating "musical" as a platonic ideal that precedes any of your tools will lead to a series of inadequate and disappointing tools, and flies in the face of the history of music - historically technology changes art, not visa versa.