2010/11/3 Andrew C <countfuzzball(a)gmail.com>om>: Music is already dead (TM) anyway...

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote: btw, its not "autotuning". just pitch recognition with quantization followed by use of a pre-existing key. its "auto tuning" but not "autotuning" :)

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 21:24 +0100, Lorenzo Sutton wrote: Definitely -- in fact, I'm sitting here at the office thinking about how I could do something similar under Linux. I'm thinking: * run audio from mic in to Rakarrack's pitch-to-MIDI converter * run the MIDI in to a synth * run the synth audio and the mic audio in to a Rakarrack's vocoder as carrier and formant, respectively Sounds like a hell of a lot of fun to me! I can't wait to try it out :) I don't think there's any point worrying about music production getting "too easy" or "too accessible" -- the ship probably sailed on that when Tascam released the Portastudio, or when Dave Smith and friends created MIDI. People have been making trite music with the best equipment money can by for years, and others have been making interesting music with toys and junk for just as long. If this helps people express musical ideas that they'd been unable to express beforehand, then that's fantastic. THanks Leigh

Hi Drew, On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 10:12:57 -0400 drew Roberts <zotz(a)100jamz.com> wrote: I see that analogy as very fitting but the conclusion as simply wrong. A novelist or poet does, indeed, spend years (a lifetime even) gaining a mastery of not only the "pencil", but also the words and sentence structure. My 8-year old daughter will attest to the difficulty involved and the years it takes to master moving her writing instrument to produce the correct glyph--not to mention putting all those glyphs together to form words, sentences and ultimately a coherent story that expresses her intent. This is agree with wholeheartedly. David

On Thursday 04 November 2010 10:43:12 you wrote: I don't agree with this but let's remove even that and give them a personal recorder and a secretary to transcribe what they have written. So, the pencil mastery is no longer needed. But this is more parallel to the music side of things and not the mastery of the instrument side of things surely? Well, my son had enough facility with the crayon to make letters from a very early age. And again, isn't the rest more on the music side of things as I mention above? Indeed. And yet I think we often have a fear of this and think it might give someone a mastery over the other side. It is as if e fear excellent voice recognition software will let anyone write the next great novel. Probably mostly when we are not thinking clearly but the fear seems to find expression often enough. all the best, drew

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 12:24 PM, David Santamauro <david.santamauro(a)gmail.com> wrote: I can't resist. You better not be trolling us... The bottom fell out of the font design business in the 80's. Desktop publishing made elaborate design with type accessible to a huge population of newly minted untrained practitioners. As a result, everyone wanted lots of cheap fonts. There was room at the top for a few type design greats and past that was a swamp of newly demanded "junk" typefaces. At least that's the story David Seigel tells. There was no longer a market for "middle of the road" fonts. There were only font collections costing thousands and font collections costing $5. I went with the cheap stuff and did my kerning by hand. Just saying. And here we all are. There are fonts and there is software and the sun continues to rise. There's even starting to be a middle market for fonts again. If I'm in that middle of the market where my livelihood depends on people needing me to make funny sounds with a keyboard and a voice, well, I'm in big trouble. If fons comes out with a new tool that automixes my otherwise good arrangement into a potential top 40 hit, and you're a mixing engineer, well, you're in big trouble. Tools that make art easier are always going to result in a flood of new and completely uninteresting art. Oh well. The orbit of the planet is usually unaffected by that. But I think the lesson of history is that in the long run, it accelerates the pace of innovation, even if it makes things ugly for awhile up front. -- Darrin

On 04/11/10 16:45, Darrin Thompson wrote: Absolutely. Since photography was invented, I daresay there is less demand for oil portraits of wealthy families. Since *digital* photography came along, skilled experts in developing and printing have more competition. These days anyone can take a photo and publish it online in seconds - but this doesn't guarantee the quality of the work. *Good* art and *good* photography still takes immense skill, no matter how good Photoshop becomes. Perhaps the gap between amateur and professional is narrowing, but I don't think it will ever close. This applies to art, photography, music, font design, and no doubt countless other things that have been affected by electronic technology over the last century. Jonathan ---------------------------- Jonathan Gazeley Systems Support Specialist ResNet | Wireless & VPN Team Information Services University of Bristol ----------------------------

On Thursday 04 November 2010 12:24:32 you wrote: Perhaps because there are musical skills / abilities / talent and instrumental skills / abilities / talent and you can have the former without the latter? (Since I sing so poorly, I often wonder why some should be born with the voices they were while I got what I got. That's life right?) If not, then there are no worries as no one without the latter will ever be able to make any decent music. As a little thought experiment, suppose one day we fins a way to hook up monitors to our brain so that the music we think gets played on an instrument so that we don't have to go through the mechanical process of learning to play the instrument... Then... Ultimately whatever process someone uses to create a piece of music, we have a few things to deal with. Is it an enjoyable / worthwhile piece of music? Was it created completely randomly and automatically and the first iteration was accepted with no critical decision at all or was judgement brought to the process and "bad" options eliminated or was the inputs controlled in some way to achieve a musical idea? all the best, drew

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 1:59 PM, David Santamauro <david.santamauro(a)gmail.com> wrote: I suggest watching the end minute or two of this (starting at 07:36): http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/11/brian-eno-milk-sea/

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 02:27:43PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: Apart from learning about Mr. Eno's ways to deal with illegal copying, I found this utterly boring. But the video does have some merits: it is one of the best examples I've recently seen of * how not to conduct an interview, * how not to film it, * absolutely lousy editing. It' a miracle they got the sound and the colors more or less right. But I missed the potted plant between the camera and Eno, as the Dutch TV VPRO used to do some 35 years ago. It was funny then. Ciao, -- FA There are three of them, and Alleline.

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 10:43:12AM -0400, David Santamauro wrote: I don't think the analogy is fitting at all. A novelist's or poet's art does not consist of being able to write or push keys on a keyboard. It consists of creating a good text. He/she could just dictate it to someone writing it down or typing it, and nothing would be lost. Now you could argue that a composer's art does not consist of being able to play all the instruments he/she writes for. So why not use a computer to find out how things sound. Simple fact is that anyone deserving to be called a composer does not depend on being able to hear the exact reproduction of what he/she writes. Entire songs, musicals, symphonies have been orchestrated or arranged rather well by composers (not only the classical ones) just sitting at their desk, or at most using a piano. They can do this because they know their trade. Which takes some time to learn. What we see today is a lot of people 1) unable to play any instrument or sing and 2) unable to create any music except by trial and error aided by technology. Yet they'd call themselves a musician. By that measure, they could call themselves painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and whatever they want. Ciao, -- FA There are three of them, and Alleline.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 16:16:26 +0100 fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote: Like I wrote to Drew earlier, I'm a firm believer that music is a language and any parallels drawn between the two are justified. But wouldn't there have to be some initial investment in learning in order to even be able to dictate? Absolutely. They can do this because the vocabulary and syntax is ingrained deep in the brain. And I'm sure many do. David

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 10:16 AM, <fons(a)kokkinizita.net> wrote: They certainly could, and rightfully so! Art is not in technical skill, it's in conception and execution. I would have absolutely no disdain for a composer who did all their composition by humming into a 4-track, then hired a transcriptionist to put it on paper, then hired musicians to record it. In fact, this is not far from the method used by Irving Berlin, one of the most celebrated American songwriters in history. He never learned to read or write music, and never learned the piano properly -- in fact he did most of his writing in F# so he could stay primarily on the black keys! He hired arrangers to turn his tunes into real compositions, and hired musicians to play everything. I think your complaint is not about technology, it's about laziness. No technology will turn a lazy person into a composer, but it can allow a good composer to spend their energy composing instead of learning something tangential. Berlin spent his early years writing songs for many hours every day -- songs that may never have existed had he spent those hours learning to sight-read for piano instead! micromoog

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 8:06 PM, Paul Davis <paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote: I don't mean to criticize. I hoped someone who was familiar with building those kinds of things would know. -- Darrin

Antares Kantos has been around for nearly a decade http://www.antarestech.com/news/reviews/kantos-KM51.pdf http://www.antarestech.com/news/reviews/kantos-RMX.pdf http://www.antarestech.com/download/kantos_addons.shtml Although making a voice-controlled version of "Reaktor" would be very interesting, and is most likely the technology in "the mouth." (see the "powered by reaktor" in the URL for starters).... Much like Traktor is basically the Reaktor engine reskinned for DJ/sample playback use; and many sample-players out there are just reskinned "Kontact" with different samples.... where Kontact might well the reaktor engine reskinned for sample playback. That's pretty smart of them to develop a single "infrastructure" product that can be repackaged into so many totally different looking sub-products. The bigger question is how can Native Instruments be based in Germany, and not support linux? Niels http://nielsmayer.com

On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 13:51:03 -0400 Paul Davis <paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote: and also they provide alsa drivers for their hardware renato