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Re: LOOPING a DRY CLEANING SHOP



Hi Matt,

I see the problem here as twofold: one of the issues is that the video does not resemble what is being played (and Per is right with his answers, that music videos usually never have anything to do with the music reality - even on normal stuff, you hear four guitars when there's only one guitarist visible; it even happens on live concerts where when e.g. AC/DC is playing you always having a hired hand backstage doubling/playing rhythm parts).

Part two, however, is more complex, and is best looked at at your comment on the book dropping sounding like a handclap.
You can make the sound of a book dropping - the sound of any book dropping anytime sound like a handclap, using only linear processing. In fact, you can turn any sound into any sound using only linear processing (*).
This had been this way for eternity, what has changed in recent years/decades is that today, this is possible using your run-of-the-mill computer and some free software.

Of course, this makes a big part of the idea and artistical aesthetic of musique concrete meaningless. Back in the early works of Pierre Schaeffer, it was interesting that the sound of splashing an egg into the pan could be turned into inflammatory bowel disease; however, the musically relevant part was that that bowel disease sound was used in a musically meaningful way.
Today, you can turn that bowel disease into a near-perfect replica of Gould's later recording of the Goldbergvariationen or vice versa - but what's the use?

With everything being possible, the craft (I'm using the word "craft" here as opposed to "art") of doing crazy sound processing has become less and less interesting. In fact so much that I find it more interesting when either unheard sounds are created (but then I don't care if it's by processing or by synthesis, and this doesn't happen that often, anyway), or when people go out and use unusual sounds recontextualized in a kind of acoustic musique concrete as in the works of Anne Gosfield (recommendation: "Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery").


The whole story:
1) music videos lie to you, the same way politicans lie to you. There may be exceptions to the rule.
2) audio processing in a form of "look how I can turn this sound into a completely unrelated one" has become uninteresting. Unless you make something interesting with it musically, but then you can also play it on your grand piano or kazoo.

          Rainer

*: linear processing means - in building blocks of the digital domain - a combination of adders, amplifiers and the hallowed delays (Richardson). Every sound has some sine wave hidden in it (Fourier). Now using your building blocks, build a filter and get one sine wave from your source sound. Feed that into a delay, then into other delays which you then modulate, and modulating amplifiers after them, you can do additive synthesis. And if you just use enough delays, the result becomes as close to the thing you want it to sound like as you care (Fourier again).


Am 28.09.2011 19:28, schrieb Matt Davignon:
There was something that bothered me about these clips, including "musician plays a tree" (also featuring Diego) and "music for one apartment and six drummers". I gradually figured out that it's not the musicians themselves. I see Diego as taking the torch from  Matmos and running with it. He is doing a lot of creative stuff.

The thing that bugs me is the video treatment and promotion. He's not really playing a dry cleaning shop as an instrument - he's making lots of tiny recordings, then arranging them on the computer to make music. The video treatment suggests that he's playing all the "instruments" from start to finish live.

The "music for one apartment and six drummers" video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVPVbc8LgP4) specifically lies to you - it doesn't even show the computer! Somehow, the drummers are able to amplify the sounds of perfume bottles, etc without microphones. Also, the sounds of books being dropped on the floor sound like handclaps, and sound exactly the same each time.

So yeah, it puts the sensationalism above the music, and that bugs me.

--
Matt Davignon
mattdavignon@gmail.com
www.ribosomemusic.com
Podcast! http://ribosomematt.podomatic.com
Rigs! http://www.youtube.com/user/ribosomematt


-- 
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