On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 11:59:45AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: Actually, I think most musicians would recognise this concept (though perhaps not when explained with too technical nomenclature), especially those who ever dabbled in composition, improvisation or even just playing together with someone else. Generally, a 'pleasing' piece contains enough 'structure' (chord progressions, chorus/verse/chorus, melody line vs counter-melody, even 'genre' in a way, etc) for the structure to be recognisable (instead of dissonant and random), yet not so much that it'd get predictable/boring. It doesn't seem far-fetched to use a computer to recognise (impro-visor) and/or apply (sibelius/finale plugins etc) those structures - at least to some extent. How far this envelope can be pushed and integrated into a composers' workflow - well - that's just interesting :). Arnout

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Niels Mayer <nielsmayer(a)gmail.com> wrote: i believe it was lord kelvin who once said "don't mistake your models for reality". anyone who thinks that there is a single way to adequately describe music clearly hasn't listened to enough of it yet.

On Tue, 25 May 2010 12:31:57 -0700 Niels Mayer <nielsmayer(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is putting the cart before the horse. People were making music long before there was any remotest concept of mathematics. Many of us still work on the basis of just noodling about and 'ooo, that sounds nice' without the slightest thought of relationships etc. The only time I ever think about chords, progressions, is when I've more-or-less finished a composition and/or want to collaborate with someone else. When I was a child, I put together a construction of timber and waxed string. To this day I don't have the faintest idea what the string tunings were. I just know it produced some lovely sound combinations. Group/orchestral instrument & synth makers are no doubt deeply involved in the mathematics of their designs, but the players don't necessarily have any concept of this. A friend of mine is a member of a local choral group. He can't read music, just uses the dots as a vague reminder of when bits go up, down speed up or slow down. He seems quite happy like that. There may be incredible mathematical 'truths' in music, but I think it will be a very sad day when people concentrate on these rather than just having fun. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Chris Cannam <cannam(a)all-day-breakfast.com> wrote: testify(wordUp); /*Chris, thanks for clarifying my point!*/ Consider how the snowflake, the mountain, coastlines, leaves and trees, whose shapes "put the cart before the horse" of the mathematics of fractals: http://www.ams.org/notices/201001/rtx100100010p.pdf (the most mind-blowing AMS paper i've read so far: is DNA and life itself "shaped" fractally in the same way time and erosion sculpts a mountain?). nature "put the cart before the horse" of analog synthesizers/computers when it made the sounds in the link below, without ever conceiving of operational-amplifiers: http://boingboing.net/2010/01/17/cracking-ice-sheets.html Last time I was thinking about this in public, I said: Niels http://nielsmayer.com

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Charles Henry <czhenry(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm willing to grant you the benefit of the doubt with regards this claim, because I suspect you mean it in a different way than you wrote it. I don't think that having a model of human musical experience is at all a necessary component of computer composition, just as it isn't for human composition. I feel that this can be said with some confidence given the fact that *different* humans have wildly different musical experiences when presented with the same material. There is no comprehensive model of human musical experience, because there is no comprehensive human musical experience. As musicians and composers, we approach the "tiling problem" Not sure about this either. Its only been in the very recent past that human composers could compose anything for an ensemble and get "direct immediate feedback" on the effectiveness. In fact, a lot of the skill of the composers of western classical music from the baroque era on seem to hinge on their ability to *imagine* what the composition would sound like rather than have any "direct, immediate feedback" on their ideas. I'm with you 100% here. For years I've been trying to figure out what the music I like all has in common. There must be something, some common experience i told myself. I *must* be able to find it. Its only been in the last couple of years that I've realized I had this ass backwards. All the music I like has one and only one thing in common: me. I, the humble listener, am the thing that unites the bach cello suites with steve roach with touamani diabate with shawn lane with steve reich with the cinematic orchestra with interpol (to name just a few). not the music, not the "structure". the listener is at the center of it all, and each listener is a different locus where some kind of rorschach-like experience takes places uniting musical experiences in unpredictable and, I suspect, utterly un-musical ways.

On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 13:54 -0500, Charles Henry wrote: The question then becomes: Do androids really dream of electric sheep, and if so, why would we care? - Computer, explain: "Like tears in rain" ?! Ravi Shankar in one his masterclasses (televised here recently) talked about hitting an inner melancholic string. If you can find that and get it to resonate so you can feel it, then others will feel it too. This is to a certain degree bound to be dependent on the cultural background of the involved parties, what kind of musical vocabulary they possess - not all elements of music can easily be explained by heartbeats or simple Pythagorean relationships, and just like with any other language you may hit an initial language barrier where it doesn't matter how beautiful a poem or well written a scientific article you present; if the audience do not recognize the words it will be in vain. As an aside, this is not in any way to say that you need to understand the /lyrics/ of a song to get the underlying musical structure - certainly not if the structure is very direct and efficiently exposed. I believe that just about anybody on this planet would be able to understand that these tongue wrestling Karelian chicks easily could eat up Pythagoras in a heartbeat: Värttinä - Käppee [*] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4YRT-MZR_U Keith Emerson, while working on the Trilogy album, also talked about searching for a kind of resonance with inner emotions - doing it by actually living them out on the piano - and then how he would use formal composition only at a later stage, as a touch-up to make ends meet. So here again we have an expert in the field in favor of using your own mind and mental abilities as the primary tool. It makes perfect sense to me - because, hopefully, the intended audience will be a lot more like people like yourself rather than, say, people from Mars. Emerson - Composing The Endless Enigma http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abVhSCzByw8 Judging by the number of ambitious ELP covers on YouTube - not all of them equally interesting - he did manage to hit a note within quite a few, and still do. As an example, here a really cool French acoustic jazz rendering with strings. No Hammond organs was stabbed to death during this performance: Jad & Den - Trilogy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNxoIDPoURY So there you have it, at the end of the day, when the last note has been written down and gone to print, as a composer - human or inhuman - you would still end up being at the complete mercy of the musicians who are eventually going to play your music. It is their sound judgment while being in the process of making what was yours into their own, that decides whether the music will finally reach out to a real human audience. If they then in that process are not listening for that inner resonance Shankar talked about, then that just won't happen. You will instead end up with something only a refrigerator could enjoy. And even if computers one day, somehow, might be programmed to elegantly dream of electric sheep, it will still be a poor substitute for us. Because we are not. /j * For an alternative rendering of "Käppee", try: Бони НЕМ :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to12RY_p2Rs