[PD] Turning non-audio data feeds into audio

[Jerome Covington]

Excellent, Mathieu.
I have a lifetime of experience in music to inform the aesthetics well.

Now I just need more on the "how", and to that extent I am very interested
in process within this community.

-- 
Regards,
Jerome Covington
 .  .  .  .   :   .  .  .  .   :
"define audio development"

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>wrote:

> On Sun, 11 Oct 2009, Jerome Covington wrote:
>
>  Is anyone interested in sharing their process for turning real-time,
>> non-audio data feeds, into music? See a great example of one possible
>> direction, here.
>>
>
> Coïncidentally, I wrote some thoughts about it in the Pd chatroom a few
> hours before your email, because of a similar topic there:
>
> «
>
> musical meaningfulness comes from meaningfulness of the data beforehand...
> basically, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.
>
> the exception to that is that a programme is a kind of data in itself, so
> the programme can be considered a kind of meaningful input... and if the
> programme imposes itself as the source of the meaning and successfully
> downplays the incoming garbage, it can make the output meaningful;
>
> but unless one is very skilled at understanding the information theory
> standpoint of music, using random values gives you just more meaningless
> music like what you are talking about... sort of like picking a random book
> from the library of babel.
>
> »
>
>  http://vimeo.com/5415629
>>
>
> now this is what I add to my above thoughts, this time in relationship to
> the video: without necessarily explicitly thinking about information theory,
> one can get to interesting results intuitively... one essentially has to
> focus on getting beautiful results for likely inputs instead of being
> content with whatever fits with the description of a certain art concept.
> Any former stock-market music I had listened to sounded like crap. What
> Patrick did was to make his programme insert so much beauty and coherence in
> the market's noise, that it made it sound meaningful... actually, it's more
> like this: the programme can only output music that sounds reasonably good
> no matter the input, and the meaningless input selects one of the possible
> nice-sounding outputs. Overall, the music is more shaped by Patrick's
> æsthetic decisions than by the stock market, and it's perfect like that.
>
> so, Jérôme, I would mostly just suggest that you make patches so that the
> results sound fairly good no matter the input you give them, and optionally,
> if you can make the input also recognisable in the output, it's a bonus
> feature that can feel very rewarding, but it depends on the context... for
> feeding stockmarket data it may not matter as much, but for live interactive
> data from performers or visitors, they have to recognise their own impact on
> the music, else the point is going to be lost on them, really. but even for
> stockmarket data, it's better if you can recognise the stock price in the
> music, because if you can't, you could have taken that data from anywhere
> else and it wouldn't matter, so why would you call it stockmarket music
> then?...
>
> so maybe you wanted people to explain their actual processes, but I hope
> that you will also enjoy this reflexion on the question of what might make
> processes be good or not.
>
>  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801
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