Ancient Surgical Instruments

Two things I wish my DAW had:

1. A “cutting floor” space for storing ideas that I want to keep around but aren’t going in the current mix. Back when Joe Musician couldn’t afford a home studio, the DAW was a tool for collecting ideas you’d already written down. Now that the tech is cheap enough, people often use their studio gear as a replacement for pencil and staff paper – especially since the advent of electronic pop music, much of which is well-outside the capabilities of traditional western notation.

Bit of a tangent there, but in any case, it sure would be nice to have a place to put ideas that I may or may not want to use.

2. Grouping for tracks, the way Photoshop has folders for layers. For some compositional forms this isn’t an issue, but as soon as you start layering a lot of tracks (three guitars for the chorus, one for the verse, five vocal harmonies, eight drum tracks, etc.), things start to get pretty messy. I almost never need to see all those friggin’ tracks at the same time, and having them there makes the creative process that much more difficult.

edit: I guess ProTools has track grouping, although the copy of ProTools that I bought became incompatible with my OS maybe a year after I bought it. Sensitive instrument, I guess.

Programmer Writes Software to Replace Tonal Composers, Hurts Everyone’s Feelings

There are a few dramatic oversimplifications in this article (it’s probably not written by a musician) and I’m not gonna make the time to read more into it today (it’s 1:30am and I got two writing sessions and a show to catch tomorrow), but it’s a really interesting read. I like the moral of: Tonal music is some clever math, not magic happy-sauce from God. Doesn’t mean it’s not awesome, it’s just not magic.

I also like how people criticize him for his work by calling him the “tin man” – saying basically that it is a heartless act to make an attempt at better understanding the materials we’re working with, and implying that tonal music is sacred and shouldn’t be explained. Lol yr feelings, keep them quartets comin’ FOO!

Apparently he’s been working on a sequel which is supposed to write “modern, original” music. There are a couple pieces posted within that article, although both of them are tonal, solo piano pieces. They do sound pretty, but judging by these his strat is still to write using staves and notes, which isn’t really where it’s been at. Is it really hard to go to the conservatory and pick up some scores?

Anyway I’m rootin’ for him, and I’m hoping he’s digging deeper than notes. But if he manages to come up with AI that writes original, modern music, well, that’s some pretty intense learning goin’ on there. We got bigger problems than ego damage in that case, ha!

It’s not so much that I’m interested in experimental music, but that I am interested in the phenomenon of people making music, and what the results signify to other people. The music I value most is forward-looking, self-aware, unattached.

I want to hear an answer to the question of what is next;
I want to hear a different answer every day;
I want each answer to repeat the question.

By the time we are sure of what is next, it has already come and gone.

Jeff Atwood posts on Coding Horror about comments – why discussion is an important and essential part of the blog format.

In the past I’ve skipped over comment threads on the web, favoring articles, which I considered to be the “real content.” I’m pretty late on this one, I realize, but I’m discovering now that comments (uh, discussion) are where it’s at. They constitute the conversational aspect of the medium. Y’know, the part where you talk to other people, rather than spilling your thoughts in a criticism-free environment. Hey hey.

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music.
- Glenn Branca, The End of Music

That any active musician can say with a straight face that there’s been no good music since WWII is pretty mind-boggling.

I mean it’s one thing when Wynton Marsalis laments the loss of his precious Jazz Music. OK, he’s a preservationist. It’s his job. Whatever. But Glenn, come on man, you’re writing these, like, symphonies for 100 guitars or whatever, playing this new shit, right, and now you’re busting out with no-good-music-in-the-last-fifty-years? Seriously, what are you listening for? There is so much out there. A bulleted list of interesting post-war musics would be beyond the scope of this blog post.

An “advance in the quality of music.” What the hell does that even mean.

Now look what you’ve done, see, I’m all riled up.