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William Fields links to "Songs in the Key of F12," an article from the "music issue" of Wired.
At first, this article sticks pretty close to the normal journalistic line about laptop music, which, for the record, is usually an ambiguous mix of pros (look at the cool toys!) and cons (it's so boring to watch; for all we know the performer could be checking his e-mail / updating his weblog / playing Minesweeper). But about halfway through, it begins to pick at the tricky question about who is "in control" of this music: the musician, or the algorithims in the software?
This question does not have an easy answer. (It may not even ultimately be a meaningful question.)
I've been talking to people about the music that I make with Number None, and invariably whoever I'm talking to asks "oh, what do you play?" I've taken to answering machines, since most of the sounds I produce for the band are elicited from a computer or an analog synthesizer. And sometimes, I feel less like a musician and more like a technician of some sort—sometimes the machines seem to generate the music on their own, and my role is simply to help that music find its way out into the world.
Or, as Shawn "Twerk" Hatfield says in the article:
"I'm trying to make new sounds, computer sounds. ... I'm never able to get the sounds that I hear in my head ... so I just play with randomness and let these things happen naturally. The networks of sound generation I set up are just spewing out all of this chaos, and from that I pull out the pieces that are worthy. It's like a garden that you're constantly trimming and manicuring." Labels: creative_process, music_commentary, technology
Saturday, April 20, 2002
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