4 ms·

Beethoven would be making techno Why? Given that making techno, or modern pop music in general, is basically trivial. Just spin up Ableton, press a few buttons

by xgk 9y ago

Beethoven would be making techno Why? Given that making techno, or modern pop music in general, is basically trivial. Just spin up Ableton, press a few buttons ... boom, 10 minutes later you've got a competitive techno-track that doesn't sound all that different (apart from mastering maybe) from what's being played in the clubs. There is no art left in pop-music -- trivial and generic. A genius would be horrified by the trivial repitition of the same that is modern pop-music.

sordina 9y ago
Link to your tracks?
- xgk 9y ago
  Why would a "link" be interesting or relevant? My point that modern pop-music is extremely generic stands/falls whether I have "tracks" or not. It's hard to deny that modern pop-music is to an extremely good approximation all in the 4/4 time signature for example, so to an extremely good approximation all modern pop-music has less rhythmic variety e.g. many/most single classical pieces.
- kruhft 9y ago
  http://n1m.co/kruhft http://n1m.co/kruhft
theoh 9y ago
Come on, art is not measured by how complex or technically intricate it is. It's a matter of feeling and atmosphere. Techno is a sensibility and a culture, not a celebration of individual masterpieces by "geniuses".
- xgk 9y ago
  That is a controversial point and depends on your concept of art. There are conceptions of art where novelty is an integral part of the very definition of artwork. I agree that pop-music is precisely about creating "feeling and atmosphere", but I would extend it by saying: "easily, quicly and widely accessible shared feeling and atmosphere". And it is precisely this requirement of easy/quick access to the shared feeling and atmosphere that makes it important for pop-music to be conventional, to be repetition of previous pop-music. Surprise is anti-thetical to the purpose of pop-music. Pop-music is acoustic wall-paper that is intended reliably to create a certain atmosphere. You can gauge the conventional nature of pop-music from the fact that you can reliably determine the genre (e.g. House/Techno, Rap, Metal, Folk etc) by sub-1-second snippets. All successful genres have signature sounds for enabling quick identification. You can think of this as an aural version of branding. This is very well-known by professional producers, musicians and music marketing.
  - theoh 9y ago
    Easy and instant recognition is often a sign of triviality, accepted. But, like in written poetry, a command of the pop idiom is not enough to create a hit: there's got to be something convincing (and generally hard-to-pin-down) about the music or lyrics. There's an art to that which survives in any genre. Even your demanding "genius" criterion can arguably be met by techno work like Autechre, in the same way that an exceptional architect might be encountered in any style or idiom of building. So I'm back-pedaling a bit on my previous remark (against genius) to suggest that any genre can be elevated by great practitioners. It's even a common mark of greatness to appreciate or at least not to be a snob about "lower" genres. The social conservatism of pop doesn't stop Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" from being culturally important, any more than the avant-garde chin-stroking of The Wire magazine guarantees artistic significance.
    - xgk 9y ago
      I'm not really pushing any specific notion of genius, but was challenging the claim that B. would be making techno today. I agree, "there's got to be something convincing", but it's unlikely to be musical. Most musicians who have a hit at all have but one hit, and then fade away. Most of the few musicians who persist (eg Rolling Stones) have a massive and well-capitalised marketing department behind them. To a pretty good approximation no musician without major backing (which is expensive) has ever been widely and/or long-term successful. To understand the nature of hits, you need to understand the music industry. Coincidentally, the music industry follows the SV VC model: fund 100, expect 99 to fail and the one unicorn who makes it big recoups (more than) the cost of the 99 failures.
sweezyjeezy 9y ago
Aphex Twin.
- xgk 9y ago
  I wish you had elaborated this comment into something substantial that readers could learn from. Here is an interesting comment that a classical composer -- possibly the most influential one in the 20th century through his students -- on Aphex Twin and similar artists: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/10/15/karlheinz-stockhausens-electronic-music-tips-for-aphex-twin-plastikman-others/ http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/10/15/karlheinz-stock...
  - xkcd-sucks 9y ago
    Influential though he may be, Stockhausen still comes across as a self-aggrandizing asshole: > I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations. Reich, Glass et al. might disagree. And course the reply: > "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to". For what it's worth, any student of "classical" (highbrow, not limited to Classical period) music will have concepts such as ostinato, fugue, motif, theme/variation, Don't Rush, etc. drilled into them. Periodicity is what differentiates music from noise and a tension between periodicity and aperiodicity is one criterion that separates good music from bad.
    - xgk 9y ago
      And course the reply: I found Aphex Twin's reply disappointing. Like a petulant child he essentially negated Stockhausen's points, without engaging with them. It seems to me that Stockhausen was trying to be helpful -- after all he had been a music teacher for nearly 1/2 century with academic offspring like Kraftwerk and Can. Aphex Twin seemingly was unable/unwilling to see that there are other approaches to music than the orthodoxy of 1990s dance music. Aphex Twin's main musical criterion seems to be dancablility: you can't dance to. Do you reckon he can dance? You could dance to Song of the Youth, but it hasn't got a groove in it, there's no bassline." I would argue to the contrary: dance music -- whatever its merits for dancing -- cannot be interesting as art music. Why? Because dancing, specially dancing well, is itself demanding: most brain capacity is used for moving the body along to the music in the right way, and that capacity is missing for listening to and analysind the fine points of the music. Reich, Glass et al. might disagree. Of course the art music tradition of American mimimalism that you refer to, does change tempi and changing rhythms quite a great deal. It does so in novel ways that had not been explored in previous classical traditions. That's the main novelty that American mimimalism gave to the world. Periodicity is what ... I agree with that, and add that modern pop-music errs on the side of too much periodicity, which renders it uninteresting as art-music, but useful as aural background and for dancing.
almonj 9y ago
There is still plenty of room left in electronic music for new ideas and exciting masterpieces. Popular music is definitely especially vile today, but that does not make the musical form itself dead.
- xgk 9y ago
  I don't see pop-music as vile. For me it's a social tool. It gets me & friends into a certain shared mood: relax, unwind, get drunk, etc etc. But it's not artistic: pop-music is surprise-free, it's conventional, it doesn't make me think "wow, I've never though of this". Au contraire. And that's why it works for setting shared social moods. It could not serve its social function if it was too original, too intellectually demanding. If it's Saturday night 2am "in the club" everybody's intoxicated the music needs to 'hit' everybody straightaway. Everybody needs to know when to raise their hands ... and that means it must be extremely predicable.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I've heard the criticism that modern electronic music is repetitive from so many music snobs, but I still don't understand what it is they have against repetition. Why is repetition so bad? Also, why is lack of repetition considered to be superior? Further, have these critics never heard of trance (as in the state of consciousness, not the music genre)? Or of altered states of consciousness brought on by drugs, (repetitive) music, and other means, to which the repetition in music can be so sympathetic? There is also the simple visceral response that people have to music -- a response that defies analysis, is not intellectual. Many people clearly enjoy being in the space that relatively simple, repetitive music brings them to, and I'm still puzzled why that's seen as being so wrong.
- xgk 9y ago
  what it is they have against repetition They find it boring. Would you come to HN every day if the linked articles never changed? I'm quite enamoured with Schmidthuber's theory of creativity [1, 2] Schmidhuber develops a theory of artificial curiosity and creativity for an autonomous agent. The agent is equipped with an adaptive predictor trying to predict future events from the history of previous events and actions. A reward-maximising, reinforcement learning, adaptive controller is steering the controller and gets curiosity reward for executing action sequences that improve the predictor. (I term this "Pattern Recognition as Pleasure".) This discourages the agent from executing actions leading to boring outcomes that are either predictable or totally unpredictable. Instead the controller is motivated to learn actions that help the predictor to learn new, previously unknown regularities in its environment, thus improving its model of the world, which in turn can greatly help to solve externally given tasks. Schmidhuber claims that his corresponding formal theory of creativity explains essential aspects of art, science, music, and humor. If we were to take Schmidhuber's approach seriously, then that that which we enjoy as great art (as creative) would be that which is on the edge of the observer's ability to compress/understand. Note that this is highly observer dependent! What I have been comprehending for a long time and dismiss as boring, might be extremly interesting for somebody else, and vice versa. In my own life this was born out: I used to enjoy pop-music so much and didn't worry about repetition -- in fact I didn't notice it. I loved pop-music so much that I learned how to make it. This lead to my disenchantment with pop-music: when I was finally able to produce decent pop-music (I was able to compress it into a few rules), I lost interest, and sought novelty elsewhere. never heard of trance I've certainly read Gilbert Rouget's Music and trance [3]. The upshot of this book is that trance is not really tied to any musical quality, but a social effect where we copy other's behaviours. [1] J. Schmidhuber, Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html [2] J. Schmidhuber, Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity. https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674 https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674 [3] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Music_and_Trance.html?id=NzT90FcmrI4C&redir_esc=y https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Music_and_Trance.html...
dang 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978745 and marked it off-topic. (It has some excellent comments but the curmudgeonly 'art these days' thing still counts as a generic tangent so it's a borderline call.)
- xgk 9y ago
  Beethoven and Goethe worked in a specific artistic context which is radically incompatible with industrial production that is characteristic of modern pop-music and marketing. Hence a facile quip like "Beethoven would be making techno in Rotterdam" is misleading and does not really engage with the subject matter. Yet, pointing this out and triggering an interesting debate gets reprimanded as "curmudgeonly" when the discussion was specifically about pop-music. May I ask what is on-topic on HN these days?

by xgk 9y ago

sordina 9y ago

Link to your tracks?

xgk 9y ago
Why would a "link" be interesting or relevant? My point that modern pop-music is extremely generic stands/falls whether I have "tracks" or not. It's hard to deny that modern pop-music is to an extremely good approximation all in the 4/4 time signature for example, so to an extremely good approximation all modern pop-music has less rhythmic variety e.g. many/most single classical pieces.
kruhft 9y ago
http://n1m.co/kruhft http://n1m.co/kruhft

theoh 9y ago

Come on, art is not measured by how complex or technically intricate it is. It's a matter of feeling and atmosphere. Techno is a sensibility and a culture, not a celebration of individual masterpieces by "geniuses".

xgk 9y ago
That is a controversial point and depends on your concept of art. There are conceptions of art where novelty is an integral part of the very definition of artwork. I agree that pop-music is precisely about creating "feeling and atmosphere", but I would extend it by saying: "easily, quicly and widely accessible shared feeling and atmosphere". And it is precisely this requirement of easy/quick access to the shared feeling and atmosphere that makes it important for pop-music to be conventional, to be repetition of previous pop-music. Surprise is anti-thetical to the purpose of pop-music. Pop-music is acoustic wall-paper that is intended reliably to create a certain atmosphere. You can gauge the conventional nature of pop-music from the fact that you can reliably determine the genre (e.g. House/Techno, Rap, Metal, Folk etc) by sub-1-second snippets. All successful genres have signature sounds for enabling quick identification. You can think of this as an aural version of branding. This is very well-known by professional producers, musicians and music marketing.
- theoh 9y ago
  Easy and instant recognition is often a sign of triviality, accepted. But, like in written poetry, a command of the pop idiom is not enough to create a hit: there's got to be something convincing (and generally hard-to-pin-down) about the music or lyrics. There's an art to that which survives in any genre. Even your demanding "genius" criterion can arguably be met by techno work like Autechre, in the same way that an exceptional architect might be encountered in any style or idiom of building. So I'm back-pedaling a bit on my previous remark (against genius) to suggest that any genre can be elevated by great practitioners. It's even a common mark of greatness to appreciate or at least not to be a snob about "lower" genres. The social conservatism of pop doesn't stop Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" from being culturally important, any more than the avant-garde chin-stroking of The Wire magazine guarantees artistic significance.
  - xgk 9y ago
    I'm not really pushing any specific notion of genius, but was challenging the claim that B. would be making techno today. I agree, "there's got to be something convincing", but it's unlikely to be musical. Most musicians who have a hit at all have but one hit, and then fade away. Most of the few musicians who persist (eg Rolling Stones) have a massive and well-capitalised marketing department behind them. To a pretty good approximation no musician without major backing (which is expensive) has ever been widely and/or long-term successful. To understand the nature of hits, you need to understand the music industry. Coincidentally, the music industry follows the SV VC model: fund 100, expect 99 to fail and the one unicorn who makes it big recoups (more than) the cost of the 99 failures.

sweezyjeezy 9y ago

Aphex Twin.

xgk 9y ago
I wish you had elaborated this comment into something substantial that readers could learn from. Here is an interesting comment that a classical composer -- possibly the most influential one in the 20th century through his students -- on Aphex Twin and similar artists: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/10/15/karlheinz-stockhausens-electronic-music-tips-for-aphex-twin-plastikman-others/ http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/10/15/karlheinz-stock...
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago
  Influential though he may be, Stockhausen still comes across as a self-aggrandizing asshole: > I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations. Reich, Glass et al. might disagree. And course the reply: > "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to". For what it's worth, any student of "classical" (highbrow, not limited to Classical period) music will have concepts such as ostinato, fugue, motif, theme/variation, Don't Rush, etc. drilled into them. Periodicity is what differentiates music from noise and a tension between periodicity and aperiodicity is one criterion that separates good music from bad.
  - xgk 9y ago
    And course the reply: I found Aphex Twin's reply disappointing. Like a petulant child he essentially negated Stockhausen's points, without engaging with them. It seems to me that Stockhausen was trying to be helpful -- after all he had been a music teacher for nearly 1/2 century with academic offspring like Kraftwerk and Can. Aphex Twin seemingly was unable/unwilling to see that there are other approaches to music than the orthodoxy of 1990s dance music. Aphex Twin's main musical criterion seems to be dancablility: you can't dance to. Do you reckon he can dance? You could dance to Song of the Youth, but it hasn't got a groove in it, there's no bassline." I would argue to the contrary: dance music -- whatever its merits for dancing -- cannot be interesting as art music. Why? Because dancing, specially dancing well, is itself demanding: most brain capacity is used for moving the body along to the music in the right way, and that capacity is missing for listening to and analysind the fine points of the music. Reich, Glass et al. might disagree. Of course the art music tradition of American mimimalism that you refer to, does change tempi and changing rhythms quite a great deal. It does so in novel ways that had not been explored in previous classical traditions. That's the main novelty that American mimimalism gave to the world. Periodicity is what ... I agree with that, and add that modern pop-music errs on the side of too much periodicity, which renders it uninteresting as art-music, but useful as aural background and for dancing.

almonj 9y ago

There is still plenty of room left in electronic music for new ideas and exciting masterpieces. Popular music is definitely especially vile today, but that does not make the musical form itself dead.

xgk 9y ago
I don't see pop-music as vile. For me it's a social tool. It gets me & friends into a certain shared mood: relax, unwind, get drunk, etc etc. But it's not artistic: pop-music is surprise-free, it's conventional, it doesn't make me think "wow, I've never though of this". Au contraire. And that's why it works for setting shared social moods. It could not serve its social function if it was too original, too intellectually demanding. If it's Saturday night 2am "in the club" everybody's intoxicated the music needs to 'hit' everybody straightaway. Everybody needs to know when to raise their hands ... and that means it must be extremely predicable.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I've heard the criticism that modern electronic music is repetitive from so many music snobs, but I still don't understand what it is they have against repetition. Why is repetition so bad? Also, why is lack of repetition considered to be superior? Further, have these critics never heard of trance (as in the state of consciousness, not the music genre)? Or of altered states of consciousness brought on by drugs, (repetitive) music, and other means, to which the repetition in music can be so sympathetic? There is also the simple visceral response that people have to music -- a response that defies analysis, is not intellectual. Many people clearly enjoy being in the space that relatively simple, repetitive music brings them to, and I'm still puzzled why that's seen as being so wrong.

xgk 9y ago
what it is they have against repetition They find it boring. Would you come to HN every day if the linked articles never changed? I'm quite enamoured with Schmidthuber's theory of creativity [1, 2] Schmidhuber develops a theory of artificial curiosity and creativity for an autonomous agent. The agent is equipped with an adaptive predictor trying to predict future events from the history of previous events and actions. A reward-maximising, reinforcement learning, adaptive controller is steering the controller and gets curiosity reward for executing action sequences that improve the predictor. (I term this "Pattern Recognition as Pleasure".) This discourages the agent from executing actions leading to boring outcomes that are either predictable or totally unpredictable. Instead the controller is motivated to learn actions that help the predictor to learn new, previously unknown regularities in its environment, thus improving its model of the world, which in turn can greatly help to solve externally given tasks. Schmidhuber claims that his corresponding formal theory of creativity explains essential aspects of art, science, music, and humor. If we were to take Schmidhuber's approach seriously, then that that which we enjoy as great art (as creative) would be that which is on the edge of the observer's ability to compress/understand. Note that this is highly observer dependent! What I have been comprehending for a long time and dismiss as boring, might be extremly interesting for somebody else, and vice versa. In my own life this was born out: I used to enjoy pop-music so much and didn't worry about repetition -- in fact I didn't notice it. I loved pop-music so much that I learned how to make it. This lead to my disenchantment with pop-music: when I was finally able to produce decent pop-music (I was able to compress it into a few rules), I lost interest, and sought novelty elsewhere. never heard of trance I've certainly read Gilbert Rouget's Music and trance [3]. The upshot of this book is that trance is not really tied to any musical quality, but a social effect where we copy other's behaviours. [1] J. Schmidhuber, Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html [2] J. Schmidhuber, Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity. https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674 https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674 [3] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Music_and_Trance.html?id=NzT90FcmrI4C&redir_esc=y https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Music_and_Trance.html...

dang 9y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978745 and marked it off-topic. (It has some excellent comments but the curmudgeonly 'art these days' thing still counts as a generic tangent so it's a borderline call.)

xgk 9y ago
Beethoven and Goethe worked in a specific artistic context which is radically incompatible with industrial production that is characteristic of modern pop-music and marketing. Hence a facile quip like "Beethoven would be making techno in Rotterdam" is misleading and does not really engage with the subject matter. Yet, pointing this out and triggering an interesting debate gets reprimanded as "curmudgeonly" when the discussion was specifically about pop-music. May I ask what is on-topic on HN these days?