[PD] "computer music" WAS: Re: Pd at a livecoding event on the BBC

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Fernando Gadea wrote:

> So they say that good piano players play with the whole body (same for guitar 
> or any physical instrument, I guess).

Is it because it makes the music any better, or because what musicians are 
after is not just the music but also the dance that a musician makes with the 
instrument?

> Art is suposed to be a free environment, meaning that it should be guided or 
> conditioned only by the artist.

According to whom?

> If you answer yes to the third, the probabilities are that your mind is 
> twisted after years of taking drugs, and maybe it was already twisted before 
> you studied art or started taking drugs. Sorry, I was joking...

Drugs usually come relatively late in the picture. They don't tend to make art 
more twisted, just more defective. They also don't have much to do with being 
twisted.

> Of course in these three questions I was only having fun while being retoric, 
> because relativity dismantles concepts as "making a difference", "quality", 
> "being emotionally involved" and even "academic" or "popular" (history shows 
> lots of examples that would complicate the difference between the last two).

Dismantling and complicating are not the same thing. Being conscious of the 
relativity doesn't make those concepts less important and it doesn't break 
them. It just breaks down a lot of talk that uses those concepts: that which is 
vague, makes undue assumptions, etc.

> At the end, anything could be poetic, as it mostly depends on who we are at 
> that right moment. It ends as a matter of self-perception.

Right.

> And as perception is not transferable, neither is poetic or aesthetic 
> experience.

Well, despite our frustrations with it, plain talking goes a long way 
transferring a lot of perception, experience, and other ideas. Calling 
perception non-transferable comes from either taking conversation as so much 
for granted that it doesn't count in the picture, or being very pessimistic 
about how well it can be effectively transferred.

> That gives us a lot of possibilities, none better than other, only 
> differents.

It's only all the same if you just don't care about the possibilities (or if 
you are trying to be diplomatic). In practice, people get involved in 
aesthetics because they are passionate about them, and they judge a lot. There 
is no absoluteness, no central authority, but there's still a lot of judgements 
and impressions of what is better and what is worse, and that's a necessity.

> It is also supposed that someone not educated would be more able to find 
> poetic in anything, because for him anything would be different from anything 
> he knows.

People don't enter university as blank slates.

> That is why we commonly despise the creations of early students, forgetting 
> that in history teachers stole several times the concepts of students that 
> "weren´t clever enough to realize the jewel they had in hands".

Students are at a disadvantage here. They are not knowledgeable in the 
research-wise artistic discourse of profs, that is what profs are bathing in 
constantly, and so they don't know what is valuable to the profs. What is 
valuable to the profs doesn't make much sense to an outsider. It's probably 
more whim-oriented than most any other discipline (?).

it was an interesting read.

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801