![damian [at] frey [dot] co [dot] nz](http://frey.co.nz/old/wp-content/themes/freynew/email.jpg)
Machine music as performance
Saturday October 28th, 2006 at 1:19 pm | ideas : musicarpi wrote (in response to Musical Structure – Build, Climax, Drop):
frey, your comments surprise me! How can you value machine generated “music” over live musicians’ work? The machines’ outputs are continuous, infinite, saying the same thing repeatedly … until the musician adjust the erformance of the instrumetn/computer … when it says something else continuously, infinitely …
Well, i’d say here that actually a guitar, or a drum, or a piano, also makes ‘machine-generated’ music. the difference between a computer and a piano is like the difference between a piano and a guitar, and the difference between a guitar and the human voice. What you’re after in each case is a feedback network between a mechanical system (wood/metal strings/speakers/laptop/vocal chords), sound (through speakers or acoustic), and some kind of control system (nervous network/brain/instinct, ie the musician).
In each case you’ve got a ‘machine’ (except perhaps the voice, although vocal chords are organic machines) that does something continuously until the musician adjusts its performance. Blow air through stretched vocal chords and they’ll make the same note until the muscle tension changes. A guitar keeps playing the same note after you’ve plucked it (continuosly, autonomously, especially if the guitar is feeding back on itself) until you move your hands on the fretboard. A piano is even more an autonomous machine – you hit a key and bunch of mechanical bits of wood strike a string, which then keeps on playing itself until it dies away and you have to hit another key to change its ‘performance’.
When the piano first came out people said the same thing as they do about the computer now, that it’s not ‘real music’, ‘just a machine’ because the musician has no direct interaction with the strings.
Listening, you can tell the difference between a laptop-musician playing in a band who is actually performing, responding to the other members in the band, and one who isn’t. A good laptop performance consists in changing the parameters of the ‘infiniteness’ of the machine’s ‘performance’ constantly or constantly enough to be a musical ‘fit’ to what’s going on with the rest of the band (if in a group) or to the direction of their set (if solo).
What do you want music to do? Bore the audience stupid? Induce mindlessness? Paint a picture? Tell a ’story’ without a beginning, middle or end? Tell a story with a structure? [tautology perhaps?] Communicate between musiciains and audience? (… sorry) Achieve communitas (a brief ecstatic and emotional state involving a sense union with everyone present and physiological responses such as ‘shivers down the spine’) for some/all people present? … or capable of buying the CD? or finding the midi file? Help everyone have a good time? Sort out identities – who claims a particular genre, or Not?
As a listener, I want music to take me on some kind of a journey around a musical landscape I haven’t visited yet. As a performer, I want music to allow me to share my particular vision of said musical landscape with an audience. Comunitas sounds like the most drastic symptom of the effect that I’m talking about, I think.
I’m not so interested in particular genres, although I have great interest in the freeing of the particular conventions of particular genres from those genres into a wider musical context; for example, releasing the steady 1/1 bass pulse from the mental/musical-political stronghold of ‘electronic dance music’, because in my experience it is not only that but so much more..
