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Freak of the week

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    Autechre production methods speculation

    in Autechre

    Posted

    2 minutes ago, xox said:

    what part didnt i understand? and what philosophy? that's not philosophy of music! google that term and you'll find it, being ''absolute music'' or not. also, try introduction to the topic like works by carl dahlhaus and hans heinrich eggebrecht

    now, the first link talks about specific methods of stochastic composition, right? that's not music! at least tell me, at which point was the author at 'action-reaction loop' during the process? it also talks about sound and stochastic synthesis. also, that's not music. m-e-t-h-o-d-s, like all academic works for the last millions of yrs. it's just pushing some non-musical plans and m-e-t-h-o-d-s, to do what? series of sound coming out of speakers, yes, but that's not music. sound alone is not music, nor is series of sound music, not even so called ''organized sound''. sound has potential to become music but i dont think that was the plan here anyway. that's why i generally hate academic 'art', where the essence of art is always somewhere in the background but their precious 'i'm so clever m-e-t-h-o-d-s' in the foreground. bravo for the effort and math, zero for artistic depth and creativity!

    copy/past from the second link: ''This Thesis proposes three main objectives: (i) to provide the concept of a new generalized non-standard synthesis model that would provide the framework for incorporating other non-standard synthesis approaches; (ii) to explore dynamic sound modeling through the application of new non-standard synthesis techniques and procedures; and (iii) to experiment with dynamic sound synthesis for the creation of novel sound objects.''

    --- do i have to say anything about this 'music'?! again, just pushing some intellectualized academic agendas!

    i sometimes find it interesting as an idea but if you like it as music, good for you! but, saying that it's more complicated than autechre?! im sorry but you're not correct here because you're trying to compare apples with rocks and that's what hit my nerve!

    Looks like somebody is triggered.  ?

    Anyway, since you are into philosophy, I would recommend you to read Formalized Music by Xenakis (it can be downloaded from *ahem* certain Russian sites). He mentions Herakleitos and Plato a lot. At the beginning of the chapter "More Thorough Stochastic Music" he says "Indeed, the challenge is to create music, starting, in so far as it is possible, from a minimum number of premises but which would be "interesting" from a contemporary aesthetical sensitivity, without borrowing or getting trapped in known paths." A bit later he says "Therefore, we find ourselves in front of an attempt, as objective as possible, of creating an automated art, without any human interference except at the start, only in order to give the initial impulse and a few premises, like in the case of the Demiourgos in Plato's Politicos, or Yahweh in the Old Testament, or even of Nothingness in the Big Bang Theory." Why did I quote him? To show you that he actually has a philosophy. In his aforementioned book there is a whole chapter called "Towards a Philosophy of Music". He also respects people like Bach and Beethoven, so it's not like he just hates everything that's old, in case you had that impression.

    In the chapter "New Proposals in Microsound Structure" he mentions the failure of the classical Fourier theory (additive synthesis) to  convincingly synthesize the sounds of the classical instruments (remember that this was pre-FM) and he also explains what are in his opinion some of the causes of that failure. So he says "We shall raise the contradiction, and by doing so we hope to open a new path in microsound synthesis research - one that without pretending to be able to simulate already known sounds, will nevertheless launch music, its psychophysiology, and acoustics in a direction that is quite interesting and unexpected." And then comes that disorder concept. So it was like " the usual approach doesn't work, let's try a different one and see what we can come up with". He is not pretending that his approach will solve everything, such an approach doesn't exist.

    Re: that whole "advanced" business - maybe I chose the wrong word, I admit that. I like to shill academic music around here because I think that it is worth shilling, and that it's not just a technical wankery (at least I don't want it to be). And I want to point out here that I don't think that everything "academic" is good, on the contrary, a lot of it is boring. Same as with the "normal" music. What does the word "academic music" even mean? It means that it was made by somebody who has a formal training in music, and that there is an artistic goal behind it. Is that a good thing? It depends, like everything else. Some people think that the music theory is just a limiting factor, and that it has to be avoided at all costs. I think that the theory can help you understand some things better and work out some compositional aspects faster than without the theory. But there is always of course the matter of your personal taste, none of us are robots. What I have discovered, listening to the academic stuff that I think is good, is that it is really rich in sounds and rewarding if you pay close attention. In the end I will just post these two FM-heavy pieces which I think are brilliant:

    /rant

    P. S. This is now officially "Academic Electronic Music Thread".

     

     

    • Like 2

    Autechre production methods speculation

    in Autechre

    Posted

    4 hours ago, xox said:

    tl;dr

    I do NOT think that everything that comes out of one's ass is art! Stand that "anything goes" just doesn't apply to me. But that's me.... Is that a narrow view? Only by my definition of art. Is my definition of art narrow? YES, it is! 

      Reveal hidden contents
     
    Spoiler

     

    Was away from my comp for a few days, sorry...

    Ok, I threw the bomb and got the facepalm. Deserved i guess! okokokok

    Anyway,.... My criticisms of the authors and their works and such music (which music i have on my hd, had them on cds and i do know their works) were mostly in the sense that they went "full retard" with their works (which to me equals to ''nonsense'') and that's all!  Do I think their works are worthless? No! I think they have a great value in history of computer art but not a great musical one, sorry and that's a big IMO. It's just IMO...

    So, as you can see Im throwing bombs again! My goal with these bombs is for a reader to understand that other people understand complex concepts differently then he is. surprise, surprise! For example, concepts such as art, music and artistic value .... Furthermore, questions such as what's music and what't not and is there an objective view in this?, what is the aim of music and art in general?, question about the motives for presenting works to other people?, how to evaluate the work?, what's the connection between subjectivity and objectivity in art and emotionally and intellectually in art?, question of the transcendence in art?, the concept of time in music in perception and abstraction of time and music?, priority and complexity vs expressiveness?, what's the source of syntax and semantics in music?, question of 'synthesis per se' in music?, what's the connection of perception it self and knowledge in music?, determinism and chaos?, ... and so on. When ppl can generally agree on these issues and questions, they're able to understand each other quite well and as i know many of you by now and i sense a great dissonance in The Force and it makes me sad in a way...

    Anyhow... We talked about it before when i gave my references in music and philosophy and other fields and no one replied with a single word, so i really dont have time nor energy to go through all that sheesh again, for nothing... Leave Britney alone!

     

    You should have simply said that you don't like that stuff instead of shitting on something of which you know nothing about. If you actually bothered to read the links I posted then you would have realized that there is a whole philosophy behind the works which I posted. I mean it's not just "I am just gonna fucking blast this shit to confuse everyone and call it art".

    But whatever, this is internet, blah blah, so who cares in the end eh?

    Autechre production methods speculation

    in Autechre

    Posted · Edited by Freak of the week

    5 hours ago, xox said:

    exactly what id call a 'nonsense music' 

    like, ''i can't make anything musically deep or interesting, but i want ppl to call me genius, so im gonna go full retard like nobody before me and if they can understand it or if they say it's emotionless im just gonna call them out''

    My post wasn't aimed to you specifically, but nevermind. I don't think that the people I have mentioned in my post would call out on anyone for not understanding it or whatever, and that certainly isn't the point. The point is the use of the unconventional approach to get interesting sounds and dynamics. Some people, me included, like that approach, others don't. And I am completely fine with that.

    3 hours ago, Lianne said:

     it's good different and extreme things exist.

    Exactly.

    Autechre production methods speculation

    in Autechre

    Posted

    17 minutes ago, Zeffolia said:

    Some cool things you could do are as follows.  I highly doubt ae do this but it could be used to synthesize abstract electronic music this way in the future

    Take a max/msp patch programmed to generate a random sequence of squelches.  Make this synth sequence be the input to a generate sequencer which builds higher and higher levels of abstraction by modifying tempo-modulating structures, the melody sequence, scale, and tuning parameters.  first this machine is programmed randomly.  then the machine will iterate the sequence forwards until it starts to have a 0.1% higher manifestation as enjoyable music at some few second time snippet, and you point out where by drawing an "enjoyment" envelope.  You train this using a recurrent neural network, specifically an LSTM (a technology used at Google to implement Google translate), to generate generative sequences from noise which are mapping the language which are some small percent closer to your tastes after that training epoch.  So you run a human-guided like generative adversarial network translating from noise into your sequence style of choice which were adversarial selected for during the listening period from which you chose good envelopes.  It's a reverse GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) where instead of a generative model sending input to a discriminative model which then ranks it and chooses the shape of the next epoch, instead it is the human playing the role of the discriminative network by acting mathematically as a training data generator as you select the enjoyable sound segments.  Presumably over time it would result in an outward manifestation of that aspect of the individual's musical taste as a real song, if it was implemented properly.  It's as if instead of using an instrument to generate music, you let the neural network use you to generate music from your mind by acting as the discriminative network through your scoring

    I actually vaguely remember some article mentioned here where RDJ was commissioning a programmer to generate him software implementing an evolutionary algorithm where he can select the compositions he likes and it migrates towards those.  This is the same thing, except instead of using a genetic algorithm you are using an LSTM recurrent neural network

    Here's an article referencing it:

    http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/29/aphex-twin-mutation-music-software/

    You may want to check out this one:

    http://editionsmego.com/release/EMEGO-241

    Neural networks aside, this  "injecting order into randomness" idea that you mention is what personally interests me a lot. Sound synthesis based on this approach was introduced by Xenakis decades ago. In his own words, the idea is  "to start from a disorder concept and then introduce the means that would increase it or reduce it". Basically, what he says is that in order to be able to discern the pitch of a given sound, the waveform of that sound needs to be rich in symmetries and periodicities. So, more regularities - more stable tone (more instrument-like), less regularities - less stable tone (more white noise-like). Of course, as far as listening is concerned, the most interesting regime is probably the intermediate one, between these two extremes. The synthesis itself works by stochastically distorting the previous waveforms in order to create the new ones, with certain constraints imposed. If you are more interested, this synthesis is described in detail in this article: http://sites.music.columbia.edu/cmc/courses/g6610/fall2012/week4/Gendy3.pdf. And this is how it sounds:

    Other composers have also done similar things. If you really wanna go deep, I recommend going through this dissertation: https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10026.1/2841/2013Valsamakis341008phd.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

    Eduardo Miranda who supervised this dissertation is a very interesting character. He wrote/edited many books on computer music, of which you may want to check out this one: https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Computer-Music-Eduardo-Miranda/dp/1846285992

    Autechre production methods speculation

    in Autechre

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Zeffolia said:

    If it's so simple show me some music that matches it.  I'm not trying to fanboy but I'm legitimately asking here because nothing else is as good.  I'd love if you could post it and be really happy about the musical discovery, but I don't think anyone else makes anything as good as it

    You should listen to academic electronic. Here are some specific albums:

    Xenakis - Electronic Music

    Jean-Claude Risset - Mutations

    Barry Truax - Digital Soundscapes

    Mike Dred / Peter Green - Virtual Farmer

    Hecker - Acid In The Style Of David Tudor

    IMHO this stuff is more advanced than anything AE have ever made (not including stuff like Bine and Gantz Graf).

     

     

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