New Concepts for Music And Sound – Part 6

(Excerpt from my e-book about this topic: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/537)

What the pioneers of electronic music worked on, emphasised more than before or even discovered, and how to translate this to our situation today:

Aspect 3:

The relation of composer, instrumentalist and machine (tape)

The tape plays a pre-recorded piece of music, and the instrumentalists answer in a pre-arranged way (Stockhausen and others). Or the Orchestra plays a composed piece of music, and the tape answers in a pre-arranged way (Xenakis and others). The tape plays a pre-recorded piece of music, and the instrumentalists deliver the answer through improvisations (Stockhausen and others). Alright then, what could be the next step, the next border to be torn down? What if not the musician, the instrumentalist, but the machine improvises? Are “random” and “generative” (what is not at all the same – just by the way) the terms we will have to focus on? I don´t think so. And my denial is not based on the fact, that even generative music and randomness in general are not new any more. If a piece of music played by a human (improvised od composed) is followed by a piece of generative music (or in simpler versions: by randomly occurring sonic events), then this is not at all an answer. We may call it pseudo-improvisation or even “wannabe” improvisation – nothing more. The machine simply plays according to a set of rules which DO NOT (CANNOT) relate to what has been played by the musician before. No, the next step the next crossing of a border is indeed using artificial intelligence, which is able to react to what the musicians hand over. And so in a sequence of human-made music – AI-made music – human-made music etc. we might be able to create something really new.

Aspect 4:

The liberation of music from scales and the organisation of sound itself

Here I´m quite unsure in which direction we could go further to bring something new. Organising timbre, organising sound itself to a musical composition seems to touch the limits of musical possibilities in this direction. To say it in a really simple way: we have already ignored scales. We have already ignored even pitch. And we have organised timbre/sound/spectra. What else is left to do here? Perhaps it´s the return to scales, but on a higher level: to scales of timbres. But is this possible at all? Aren´t there unlimited amounts of different sounds – opposed to the lower (but still high – think of microtonal works) number of distinguishable pitches? And how to respect the dynamics, the changes of the spectra over time which are determiners of a certain sound as well? We have structures of pitches called scales like Cminor, Fmajor etc. But will we be able to organise sound/timbre/spectrum in anything like “green” of “blue” or “dark” or, or, or? And then define the sonic equivalent to a chord progression (I-IV-V-I for example), a specific sound progression? I simply don´t know.

Enjoy your day!

Rolf

… to be continued

New Concepts 1: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/503

New Concepts 2: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/528

New Concepts 3: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/529

New Concepts 4: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/542

New Concepts 5: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/544

New Concepts 7: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/553