The worlds largest digital “orchestra”
Last week the “worlds largest digital orchestra” performed at York university. Apparently this consisted of a 50 students sitting around with MacBooks and waving their hands around a bit. The camera did some gesture recognition and: tada, you have an amplified, probably painfully synthesized, second-rate simulacrum of a real orchestra concert. Yes, I’m a little skeptical.
While the idea of synthesized music is really neat, and kinda appealing to me as a great big geek, the reality (at the moment, anyway) is usually quite painful to anyone who has heard real instruments. It brings back horrible memories of MIDI sequenced “orchestral” melodies. I dunno if it’s still prevalent, but up until fairly recently on Wikipedia several of the sample pieces of music on composer pages were MIDI tracks. Poking around there now seems to indicate this has mostly been discontinued, thank god. I honestly feel it would be better to not have any samples then to have some horrible MIDIesque one.
I’d like to see a video or recording of the event described above, as it sounds intriguing (even if most descriptions are centered on bloody Apples part in the deal) and according to at least one article the concert was streamed live. However the York music department website seems to contain absolutely no information about the event. It seems from what little information I can gather that they were attempting to mimic a real orchestra, as opposed to the other “digital orchestras” (specifically PLOrk and the “Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra“, god what a horrible name) who seem to go for more electronic, computery type music. In principle the idea of replicating the sonic characteristics of physical instruments is fascinating, however I bet a whole bunch of stuff that the reality is still far from perfect.
There’s a lot of information about laptop “orchestras” here.
Minimalism and Electronic Dance Music
After listening to Glass’ violin concerto more than once but less than a bunch of times in the last for days, I’ve finally accepted the zeitgeisty suspicion that modern dance music was heavily influenced by minimalism (I should have said heavily informed by minimalism, that sounds so much more professional. Oh well, guess I blew it). Whether this is a good or a bad thing, or totally, completely neutral is something I am trying to decide on.
Before I switched to classical my tendencies were tending pretty strictly toward IDMey type stuff, and I always kind of suspected that the slow-developing, relatively through-composed nature kinda eased me into classical stuff. It’s only just recently, after hearing Glass, that the similarities really really really jump out.
The thing is, now that I’m mostly off of the dance it mostly sounds a bit… dull. Repetitive. Like there’s one or two good ideas and they are repeated again and again and again. It’s a little early at this juncture (sound professional now, don’t I?) to pass too much judgment, but I’m not convinced it’s gonna have enough staying power. It definitely seems like a completely different kind of musical offspring then the majority of classical.
This is just the kind of thing I meant
Zoltan gave me a fantastic link to the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas project called “Keeping Score”, which is almost exactly what I described in my last post on automated liner notes. Just click on the “Explore the Music” link when you get there. I strongly encourage you to take a look (and subsequently waste a whole bunch of time there). Now if only they did it for more pieces, and did it for the entire piece!
More Thoughts on Automated Liner Notes
A few days back I wrote a post in which I longed drastically for a form of real-time liner notes. When you play an MP3 or CD on your computer you could click a button and choose from either the standard background information you get with the CD inlay, or a much more exciting commentary on the piece which updates as the music progresses. In its most simple form it would indicate when a new theme enters, or an old theme comes back, or when the exposition ends, for example. You could also choose a more detailed “expert” version which would give a more detailed analysis of the structure of piece: keys, inversions of melodies, etc.Two things became clear after some excellent responses to the post. One is that (somewhat unsurprisingly) this has (sort of) already been thought of. Multiple times. ACD brought my attention to the (fleeting) existence of the Concert Companion, a handheld device which one was given to use during a live concert: “the Concert Companion delivers explanatory text, program notes and video images in real time with the music”. Hmmm. That sounds like a bunch of people playing on the internet during a concert. Yvonne told me that in Queensland they tried something similar but it was actually projected on the walls of the concert hall.
Neither of these sound like a particularly great idea. The idea of a non-optional thing is just horrible for a start. If there is going to be an optional thing then I don’t think it should be an alternative stream of information to the concert at hand, which is kind of hard to pull off in a live setting as you tend to be watching the performance. Another problem is that in a concert-hall setting it’s probably not going to be particularly appealing to any experience level. I would imagine that unless it is extremely well designed, a listener unfamiliar with the piece will be given too much information, too rapidly, whereas a listener who knows it well will probably find it an annoying distraction.
I think it would be far better suited to a situation in which you can listen to a piece multiple times; that is, at home. The depth-revealing kind of information which is provided by liner notes is usually most interesting and valuable to me after hearing a new piece about four or five times (so that my head has a basic conception of the melodies and how they fit together). It also seems like the kind of situation in which it would be extremely valuable to be able to replay a section or movement. When you are informed that a new melody is coming in, for example, it’d be nice to be able to replay that bit until you can see it yourself, otherwise it’s just like listening to someone else talk about how well they know the music.
ACDs second link showed me that he was thinking along similar lines after learning the horror (for him) of the dreaded Concert Companion. Over two years ago he wrote:
“And then, in an epiphanic flash, it struck me. While the Concert Companion in the concert hall is a genuine horror, there really is an appropriate and proper place for the device: in the home, keyed to a specially prepared classical music or opera CD or DVD coded in manufacture to deliver the proper signals to the Concert Companion.”
I think there is an even greater advantage now with the rise of the MP3 format and truly digital music. It would be almost trivial to write a piece of software that would display notes in sync with a particular recording of a classical concert (since each performance has different speeds you would have to adjust the timings accordingly, but that would be pretty easy. If you wanted to be really crafty you could try and do very basic sound recognition and use that to automatically adjust the timings), You could even incorporate it directly into a website with a built-in music player. There would be a little applet in which you could select a piece, and real-time information would be provided alongside it. That would be great, and not terribly hard to set up, as long as you had non-copyrighted music to use, and of course the liner notes!
I think the big advantage of mp3s and the internet is that people can independently create the liner notes for a particular piece, or individual movement, completely independently from the people who originally performed the piece. It doesn’t have to be incorporated into the CD itself and the recording company doesn’t have to write any special software. The work can be done as an add-on by enthusiasts and freely distributed on the web.. I’d love to put something like this together, and I don’t think it would be too hard given the right textual and musical resources.
Anyone want to try it?
Music I want to get my grubby mitts on
After (not really) splurging on a Naxos radio subscription, I’ve been spending my lab days sucking new music up through my ears. Absorbing it – maybe that’s a more sensical choice of words, the ear-suction imagery is a bit too disturbing. Anyway, regardless of the transferral mechanism I’ve been introduced to a whole host of new music which is now highly in demand by me. This includes:
Balada – Wikipedia page here, personal webpage here, sound samples here.
Ryabov – This guy is hard to find anything on. The Naxos page is here.
Brusa – Wikipedia page, personal page, sound samples.
I also wanna get some stuff by some not so new fellows: Myaskovsky and Glass. Or maybe we should just get around to watching that copy of Koyaanisqatsi we got on Netflix flippin’ ages ago and never returned.