X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4dev PL43]
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.emusic-l
Date:         Wed, 29 Jul 1992 13:14:45 EDT
From:         "Joseph D. McMahon" <xrjdm@CALVIN.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Subject:      Re: nets continued
Comments: To: EMUSIC-L@american.edu
              30, 92 11:01:30 am

ronin writes:
> so what would you do? how would you represent the patterns that are so clear
> to you as a musician or an audience? when looking at a score, your eye does
> not see statistical properties. it registers motion, density, uniformity.
> midi data does not, to the reader or to the programmer, communicate music
> except by several layers of internal translation. and is there a rough
> isomorphism between how the eyes and ears interpret the score and the music?
> to my mind there is. if i were to describe a music without reference to style,
> i would think in terms of motion, density, and uniformity, as well as
> consonance, which does not seem to me to be so clear on the page. would i then
> represent notes in some manner that preserves something of their relations
> (since it the relations among things that defines pattern)? specify an event,
> not in terms of its absolute pitch and duration, but in terms of its
> difference with respect to the last event? can one encode a macro-structure,
> a tendency? and so on.

I remember a remark by Doug Hofstader about Chopin - after listening to the
music a lot and deciding he wanted to try to play it, he bought the scores
to the preludes, only to find out that he was facing what he called "grinning
skeletons" of the music. If you're looking into the design of a score-to-
MIDIfile translator, then scores are worthy of analysis, but if you want a
music listening-program, you are being seduced by the the power of vision
over our other senses - I'm not sure that it adds anything but complexity.

Now, feeding the program a MIDI file to "read" while it listens may be
more useful, since there's a lot of information there which *has* been
processed for you - the pressure and velocity data, precise note data,
and other information which makes it easier to "get inside" the performance.
Maybe this is too much information...?

However, speaking as a improviser and musician, this doesn't have a lot to
do with how I listen to a piece of music. The primary thing that I hear
in music is patterns and relations. Even in the most abstract music, a
recurring rhythm or musical figure can be latched onto to help establish
a context in which the piece can be rooted.

It seems to me that the analysis of a piece of music is sort of like
watching a movie: the actions of the players (pun intended) are defined
in relation not only to the background, but to each other. An action in
one context may have a completely different implied meaning in another
context. A music listener needs to be able to shift focus from
"foreground" to "background", and to recognize things in obscure contexts.

Try listening to a Bach fugue. You can either follow a single voice, in
which case the others "blur" into a harmonizing background, or you can
follow the overall flow all at once; but it is intensely difficult to
listen to two voices and to try to follow them simultaneously. Perhaps
you will want multiple listeners, who can compare notes?

Stockhausen says that Kontakte (the all-electronic version, at least)
is based on multiple scales, which use notes which cover wider and
wider spectral ranges, and on rhythms which are shifted from very long
periods to audio frequencies. I caught the second part and had verbalized
it to myself, but until I read his comments on the piece, I did not
realize the first part. Going back and listening again with this
information made it much more obvious what was going on in the piece
and why it is as long as it is. How does one represent such meta-information
about the piece? Certainly gaining it greatly increased my understanding
of how the piece worked and why. The question here, I guess, is how would
one deduce such a thing? I certainly missed them, and I think I'm a
relatively sophisticated listener...

 --- Joe M.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
Subject: (no subject given)