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

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 7 Oct 2009, Fernando Gadea wrote:
> Mathieu Bouchard escribió:
>> 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?
> In a physical instrument the position of the body when playing modifies 
> the dynamics of movements, so variations in the dynamics of movement 
> produce also diferent dynamics of sound. If you press a key with a 
> strong movement it will almost shurelly be different if you do it 
> sitting on a chair, with your head and back aiming behind your 
> gravitational center, that if you do it whith your body aiming foreward 
> or if you do it standing on your feet.

Yeah... well, I guess it's possible to imitate the natural playing style 
of any body position using any other body position, but then it would be a 
bit like ventriloquy. For example (in Spanish), the vowel A is open, 
vowels E+O are medium, and vowels I+U are closed, but what matters is the 
amount of opening in the mouth as a whole, not just the tongue or the jaw. 
You could do it with just the tongue and not the jaw, but it's more 
difficult and the only point is to give a different impression with the 
sound than what it looks like you'd be doing if you were talking normally.

> gives the musician a wider sound palette (Sorry, I am not shure if this is 
> the word).

sounds like a good word for that.

>>> Art is suposed to be a free environment, meaning that it should be guided 
>>> or conditioned only by the artist.
>> According to whom?
> Anyway, as any definition of art is possible while it must be 
> contextualized, I agree that we could talk of other kinds of art where 
> freedom is not important or does not exist at all.

Yeah, the word "art" just like the word "being" and the word "freedom", 
are used in many related and not-so-related ways by different people as 
tools to express their ideas and ideals. I admit right away that I don't 
know nothing about those philosophers' conception of art, but it sounds 
quite peculiar that they would claim such a thing... they surely use a 
non-recursive (non-transitive) definition of "guided" and "conditioned", 
skipping over all the thinking about what guides or conditions the artist, 
which is nice if that's what they want to skip thinking about. Anyway, 
that's the thought that made me ask the question in the first place.

>>> 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...
> I was just joking and being metaphoric and rethoric.

I know I know, but jokes are as meaningful as anything else, else we 
wouldn't bother saying them in the first place.

>> 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.
> Besides that, There have existed circunstances when drugs have been part 
> of the creative environment and I wouldn´t agree that the results were 
> defective.

Yeah. For example, if a musician has a headache and is supposed to be 
recording right now, the musician takes aspirin. that's part of the 
creative process.

But also, if the musician has adopted a «lifestyle» such that various 
substances of dubious usefulness have hijacked his/her dopamine subsystem, 
then a stable amount of those substances have to be taken in to support 
the creative process, else it becomes a process of frantically running 
around the city to find the appropriate shady people that support the 
musician's brain damage.

I know what you mean, I just want to point to other realities that are 
probably taking most of the room that drugs are taking in this vocation.

> And I would say that "defective" is another relativable concept.

Yeah, for example, drug users who argue that everything is alright end up 
changing their minds about it and start claiming that drugs made them lose 
years of productivity, lots of opportunities, ... they think it's 
relative, because it sounded like a good idea, then it sounded like it ok, 
then it sounded like it would be better without, then it sounded like it 
was a tremendous waste after all. it's all relative. and then there are 
those who you can only imagine wishing to claim the same, because they 
passed away.

>>> 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. [...]
> I understand what you mean, but the fact is that perception is not fully 
> transferable. If it was, there would be no difference between any sound/image 
> and a description of it.

You didn't say "fully" and in that case it doesn't mean the same at all.

>>> That gives us a lot of possibilities, none better than other, only 
>>> differents.
>> [...] 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.
> Maybe yes, but what I am trying to say is that I believe that those 
> discussions about better-worse are also relativables, and then they shouldn´t 
> end in duality (unless it is stated that this duality is related to the 
> speaker), because when they do it probably means that a part of the true will 
> be left out, and maybe that´s not an implicit necessity of the art world.

in the end, people still choose to spend their time with certain art and 
not certain other art, and this is implicitly a judgement of value. those 
judgements are both relativables and an implicit necessity of the art 
world. everybody chooses an opinion or is chosen by an opinion or feels 
compelled to have an opinion which is often not someone else's opinion, 
but all those different opinions work together towards giving (or not 
giving) actual value to specific artworks: reputation, money, and the time 
of the day.

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801