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This is really fascinating to me. I've often wondered what exactly makes an artist/musician. Is it the person who can create it in their head, or the person who

by cronix 7y ago

This is really fascinating to me. I've often wondered what exactly makes an artist/musician. Is it the person who can create it in their head, or the person who can actually write it down and/or actually play it on an instrument? Up until now, it's always been the latter. Not everybody can read/write music or play an actual instrument, but most can create it in their head. Like, I'm sure most of you can create a simple tune and hum it, and don't know how to read/write music or play an instrument. This kind of thing would allow you to. I wonder how many hidden artists throughout time have created brilliant masterpieces, but just could never express it.

pmoriarty 7y ago
I'd encourage you to read Brian Eno's "Composers as Gardeners"[1], which talks about a different way of looking at composition, which is pretty different from the usual way people think about it. Many non-musicians are under the impression that composers think up music in their head and then write it down, and while some do work that way to some extent (with they myth of Mozart working like that in the movie Amadeus being probably the most well known and most extreme case of composition being completely like that), for most composers (including Mozart) this is much more of an iterative, experimental process. In recent decades, and especially with the advent of electronic music and computers, a lot more randomness and elements not fully or directly under the composer's control have entered in (though, again, this goes back at least back to the age of Mozart, with his dice game[2]). There's a whole field of algorithmic composition[3] where music-generation becomes either semi-automated or even completely automated, and the composer's role is one of writing or choosing the algorithms, and of choosing various other aspects of the music (such as which instruments or sounds get used) but without pre-determining the final work in totality or in advance. Brian Eno talks about this much more eloquently and deeply than I can, so I again encourage you to read his talk. [1] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/composers-as-gardeners https://www.edge.org/conversation/composers-as-gardeners [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition

by cronix 7y ago

pmoriarty 7y ago

I'd encourage you to read Brian Eno's "Composers as Gardeners"[1], which talks about a different way of looking at composition, which is pretty different from the usual way people think about it. Many non-musicians are under the impression that composers think up music in their head and then write it down, and while some do work that way to some extent (with they myth of Mozart working like that in the movie Amadeus being probably the most well known and most extreme case of composition being completely like that), for most composers (including Mozart) this is much more of an iterative, experimental process. In recent decades, and especially with the advent of electronic music and computers, a lot more randomness and elements not fully or directly under the composer's control have entered in (though, again, this goes back at least back to the age of Mozart, with his dice game[2]). There's a whole field of algorithmic composition[3] where music-generation becomes either semi-automated or even completely automated, and the composer's role is one of writing or choosing the algorithms, and of choosing various other aspects of the music (such as which instruments or sounds get used) but without pre-determining the final work in totality or in advance. Brian Eno talks about this much more eloquently and deeply than I can, so I again encourage you to read his talk. [1] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/composers-as-gardeners https://www.edge.org/conversation/composers-as-gardeners [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition