On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 18:12 +0000, c wrote:
I'm
curious about this. What kind of musical decisions are pre-made by
commercial software for the user?
quite a few. in the case of something like ableton live, the
composition process is distilled down to turning on and off
bar-quantized loops, and slathering on FX. the McDonalds equivalent of
slow food...
or take something like Fruity Loops, which singlehandedly dictates the
stylistic signature of many recent UK beat-producers like Ruff
Sqwad...
i guess the argument could be made for being able to override the
defaults, but its sort of like digging a canal, people will put up
some trees here and there, or paint their boat red...but its still
going down the canal...
you can a *lot* further than either of these examples. go watch a demo
or actual use of the Stylus RMX plugin. you can generate roughly 16-20
channel rythmn mix for a track in a few minutes by just pressing buttons
that pick certain style constraints. it made me puke, but i know that
there are people who write music for a living, not as a means of
creative expression, and for them, tools like this are actually
incredibly helpful.
--p