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From: maverick@mahogany.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: reality and computer sound [was WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THIS NEWSGROUP?]
Keywords: question for discussion
Message-ID: <1991Jun14.164758.23557@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 91 16:47:58 GMT
Article-I.D.: agate.1991Jun14.164758.23557
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Reply-To: maverick@mahogany.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick)
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To reverse the decay of comp.music into rec.music.synth.backup, Greg
Sandell proposes chasing all the synth people away, and then says such
researchers as he have no time to contribute.  I think the latter is
the real problem -- the only way to influence the tone of the newsgroup
is by positive contributions.  So, since we haven't had any exciting
computer-music discussions lately, I'll do my feeble best to start one,
with a question that I know lots of people have opinions about.

What is the relevance of real sounds to computer music?  Gerald Balzano
took a radical position in his article "What Are Musical Pitch and
Timbre?" [Music Perception 3(3), Spring 1986]: briefly, that the
sensations of timbre are really a perception of the dynamic systems
underlying the production of the sound, and thus that electronic music
is doomed to sound "electronic", i.e. less than musical, unless we tap
such dynamic systems in synthesis.  I incline much more to the Jim
Randall-type position that if some piece of music sounds "merely
electronic", that's the fault of the composer or possibly the listener;
that nothing intrinsic to "a timbre" prevents our learning to make its
context make music of it.

Two pieces come to mind as touchstones for my own thought on this issue
-- Pauline Oliveros' (analog) piece "II of IV", which is very frankly
"just" the sound of a bunch of cheap oscillators and a tape delay, and
is fascinating; and Jonathan Harvey's (computer) piece "Mortuos
Plango", which uses Fourier analysis of a bell sound (and less
successfully, a voice) for its source material, moving intricately in
the domain between convincing bell tone and compilations of sine waves.
(Without computationally simulating a bell....)

Okay, enough maundering.  Help save comp.music -- pontificate today!

	Vance