Re: [linux-audio-user] Thesis: Playing and making music

On Sunday 10 December 2006 08:48, Dave Phillips wrote: Yeah, I've been a gamer all my life (almost literally... the first home videogame came out in 1972, when I was 3, and my parents bought it... and I got my first job 9 years later just to have quarters for the arcade.) I've been playing and/or writing music for most of that time as well. I enjoy Guitar Hero and DDR and the ocarina parts in Zelda, as simple as they are. But there's a huge difference between even the most complicated controller with two joysticks and 16 buttons, and the 88 velocity-sensitive keys of a piano or the six strings and innumerable chords and techniques of a guitar. On the other hand, except for improv or maybe the kind of playing where you have to sight-read something without having rehearsed it first, there's really nothing in music that requires the kind of response time necessary to play the more twitchy videogames, like shooters and fighters. You're executing a predetermined, practiced performance of something that's been previously scripted, for the most part, and it's your interpretation of that performance that makes it art rather than mimickry. You're not responding to new and unexpected stimuli except in the above-mentioned cases. I think that videogames are easier to master overall, though, because they have clearly-defined success and failure conditions. You can play a musical passage to absolute perfection and still have people going, "I dunno, it seemed kinda stiff." With games, you just have the computer judging you either through your character living or dying or by more direct performance criteria ("Perfect: 227! OK: 8! Miss: 1!"), but with music, you just have your audience and yourself. This is why I think computers are an ideal start to music education, since they give immediate feedback and you can make a DDR-like game out of it, but with current technology you need more than a computer to evaluate you. In the end, the two fields of endeavor are just different, even if some of the basic skills may appear similar. Video games may have more in common with music than, say, a real life game of basketball, but I think the thought processes are still closer to sport than art. I bet that the Wii remote will make an awesome (but still not right-on) virtual theremin possible pretty soon, though. Then we'll start seeing how you can mix musical performance and videogames in more meaningful ways than "press the buttons in time with the lights." Rob