From: gifford@krang.vis.citri.edu.au (Jonathan Gifford)
Subject: VR music making (with a little cut+paste thrown in)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Distribution: aus
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 06:17:38 GMT

I guess quoting your own articles is a sign of desperation, but...

gifford@krang.vis.citri.edu.au (Jonathan Gifford) writes: 
> many of the earlier "technology" bands ... had an underlying
> philosophy of alienation and despair

By "early techno bands" I mean people like Kraftwerk... I.e. purely
synth. On reflection, I guess tubular bells type stuff has been around
even longer, and doesn't share the same philosophy...

Now on to the real reason for this posting...

>My view
>is that these things (samplers, sequencers, auto-boxes) take some of
>the drudgery away, and allow you to be more creative, since you don't
>need to spend two years being indoctrinated into an arcane and limited
>regime.

Has anyone seen anything about musicians who use use VR technology to
create music. I have a strong feeling that it is happening at The
Media Lab (tm)(R)(C). I saw a very short film about it last year
sometime, with someone in a full body suit hooked up to a computer and
a bunch of synths. The VR suit allowed him to "conduct" an orchestra,
or play various instruments. The computer figured out what his
movements were, and picked the appropriate synth(s) to do it. Looked
like the kind of instrument I could actually play!

This is the sort of thing I meant about being more creative. All that
happens when you learn to play an instrument is that you tailor you
fine motor skills to be able to reproduce particular sounds from
whatever it is you's hitting/scratching/strumming. Now I'll agree that
there is a sublime simplicity in a well played acoustic guitar or
piano, but I don't see why people aren't prepared to grant a similar
aesthetic rating to well crafted but computer generated sounds. The
pure sinusoids of a casiotone sound *too* pure perhaps, and thus too
"shallow" (for want of a better word). Of course we could just add
harmonics to flesh them out to "natural" sounds, but doesn't this lose
some of what we're trying to achieve. Getting back on track, maybe if
we didn't have to spend so much effort learning the fine motor skills,
we could explore new territory in the creative realm. I *like* the
idea of a music maker that is limited only by what you feed into it,
and the fusion of all that food is controlled by a much less
constricted range of movements on the part of the musician.

Having actually put all this down, I'm now thinking maybe you would
still spend a lot of time just learning how to control the thing...

Another of the projects at the media lab is am automatic accompanist,
which listens (god, anthropomorphism unlimited) to someone playing
some instrument (forget what, exactly, maybe a violin) and accompanies
them. Maybe if we got a whole bunch of such things, we could have
automatic jams :-)

I can't help feeling that people are mainly opposed to techno-music
because it takes people out of the loop, and people don't like being
told that a machine can do it better...

jon
-- 
Jonathan Gifford        gifford@vis.citri.EDU.AU        gifford@cs.mu.OZ.AU
--- CITRI, 723 Swanston St, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia  +61 3 2822475 ---
      He didn't say "thou shalt have dominion over a big wad of tofu"