6 ms·

Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.

by holri 13y ago

PavlovsCat 13y ago
That sounds kind of esoteric / superstitious to me. Has this been blind tested? Anyway... computer music has the soul of the people selecting the samples and the parameters for instrument synthesis, and choosing when and how to play them. That's why all that is done manually. Heck, on the C64 (probably not just there) it wasn't unusual for composers to write their own composing software and playback routines.
- holri 13y ago
  In the C64 days I programmed my TI99/4A to play Bach. It sounded awful. The interpretation had no soul. Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.
  - Stwerp 13y ago
    Is soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply. For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc. This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to it. You could tell us which piece you think has more, or any (I'm not sure if soul is quantifiable or just a binary existence) soul.
    - holri 13y ago
      No soul, is not imprecision. It is the expression of humans feelings in form of variation of duration, velocity, loudness. For example speed in music is like speed in breathing. You are not breathing with the same speed all the time. It depends on the context. If you are in a hurry you breathe fast and short. If you sigh you breathe deep and slow. An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported. These emotions are unfortunately not sufficiently presentable in MIDI files or music notation. As Mahler said the essence of music is not in the sheet. Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.
      - PavlovsCat 13y ago
        > Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music. Music that wasn't written on and for a computer, no. Yet it's perfectly possible to manually craft "variation of duration, velocity, loudness" for every single note of every single instrument -- just not by feeding music in standard musical notation into a sequencer unchanged! I agree that MIDI isn't very sophisticated, but it's hardly the last word of music written on and played back by computers. Just consider how young this all is! I'm pretty sure physical instruments and the songs played on them started out kinda simplicistic, too. And tribal music for example often isn't so much about expression emotion, but putting people into a trance-like state by endless repetition, and techno does that just nicely already. It's not my cup of tea generally, but I get the same out of chip tunes: I don't need sophisticated music, I just need a canvas for my ears and soul to draw on, I can fill in the blanks or dream up harmonies on my own. > An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported. True, but also a.) it doesn't stop there. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if a simple "gridlike" composition makes me sad, happy or gives me goosebumps, that's "soul enough" for me. Even the soul of a simpleton is still a soul :) b.) the computer enables composer and interpret to be the same person.. and if they so desire, they can put endless amounts of detail and emotion into a piece. Personally I have no doubt that people like Mozart would have been all over computers as an instrument, and the wide range of expression they offer already.
        holri 13y ago
        The problem lies in the context. If we speak to each other we take human context into account. So does a musical interpret. It is just another medium. Music instead of words. A computer does not understand human context. This has already be proven by Weizenbaum with his program Eliza. If the Computer does not understand emotion, he does not understand how to create music. There is no possibility to formalize music exactly, so that a computer can play it accordingly. I doubt that this will ever be possible because a true artist takes human context into account in his performance. So there is no static formalization of music. The only solution would be that the composer plays live on the computer. But an instrument that can not be played by humans is useless in this situation.
    - pit 13y ago
      What about a recording versus a live performance? Isn't a MIDI essentially a super-low-resolution digital recording, minus any spatial acoustic noise? Is soul then contained in space, or the presence of those souls present? Here's an idea for a test: start with a song recorded at 44100Hz (standard CD quality) that has soul. We can debate the actual piece of music, but I'll use "Clap Your Hands" by A Tribe Called Quest in this example. Give a bunch of people a randomly-downsampled version of the song (at 12500Hz, 800Hz, 220Hz, etc), and have them answer a simple question: "Does this have soul?" The song is 93BPM, or 1.55 beats per second. At a sample rate of 1.55Hz, we're looking at one sample per beat. Let's use a standard 16-step sequencer and say that a MIDIfied approximation is going to have four samples per beat (quarter notes). So, at about 6.2Hz, we've got a recording that has no better resolution than MIDI (potentially even worse). Ultimately, I guess I agree with you: "soul" is in the ear of the beholder. (Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about digital audio.)
  - vidarh 13y ago
    And all your experience tells us is that the Ti99/4A did not have good sound chips and/or you are not good at writing music for it. Meanwhile, I still listen to certain C64 music regularly that I greatly enjoy, because the composer knew how to extract great music even from something as limited as that.
    - holri 13y ago
      No, the TI99/4A had no understanding of music. You have to have emotions to understand music. A Computer does not have emotions.
tesseractive 13y ago
So does that mean that piano music played on an insufficiently fancy piano is soulless as well?
- holri 13y ago
  I have a Kawai MP10 digital Piano and an old hand made analog Hofmann piano. If I play for example just the last Chord (6 Notes) of Chopin Prelude op. 28/4 on the Hofmann the music goes deep through every nerve. Nothing comparable happens on the Kawai even with very good speakers.
  - tesseractive 13y ago
    Are you saying that those 2 data points constitute a spanning set of the possibilities?
    - holri 13y ago
      Do you understand the concept of a example?
  - yongjik 13y ago
    That's what people who buy monster ethernet cables say.
  - bane 13y ago
    Bad musicians frequently blame the instruments.
    - holri 13y ago
      You mean good musicians do not distinguish good and bad instruments?
      - bane 13y ago
        A good musician can play world class music on a rusty spoon, a used pie plate and a one-string-out-of-tune-$20-guitar. Crap musicians are those that rely on fancy instruments to make up for their lack of basic musicianship. Even a drunk martini bar pianist can sound halfway decent on a $70k Steinway or Bösendorfer.

Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.

by holri 13y ago

Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

That sounds kind of esoteric / superstitious to me. Has this been blind tested? Anyway... computer music has the soul of the people selecting the samples and the parameters for instrument synthesis, and choosing when and how to play them. That's why all that is done manually. Heck, on the C64 (probably not just there) it wasn't unusual for composers to write their own composing software and playback routines.

holri 13y ago
In the C64 days I programmed my TI99/4A to play Bach. It sounded awful. The interpretation had no soul. Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.
- Stwerp 13y ago
  Is soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply. For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc. This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to it. You could tell us which piece you think has more, or any (I'm not sure if soul is quantifiable or just a binary existence) soul.
  - holri 13y ago
    No soul, is not imprecision. It is the expression of humans feelings in form of variation of duration, velocity, loudness. For example speed in music is like speed in breathing. You are not breathing with the same speed all the time. It depends on the context. If you are in a hurry you breathe fast and short. If you sigh you breathe deep and slow. An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported. These emotions are unfortunately not sufficiently presentable in MIDI files or music notation. As Mahler said the essence of music is not in the sheet. Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      > Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music. Music that wasn't written on and for a computer, no. Yet it's perfectly possible to manually craft "variation of duration, velocity, loudness" for every single note of every single instrument -- just not by feeding music in standard musical notation into a sequencer unchanged! I agree that MIDI isn't very sophisticated, but it's hardly the last word of music written on and played back by computers. Just consider how young this all is! I'm pretty sure physical instruments and the songs played on them started out kinda simplicistic, too. And tribal music for example often isn't so much about expression emotion, but putting people into a trance-like state by endless repetition, and techno does that just nicely already. It's not my cup of tea generally, but I get the same out of chip tunes: I don't need sophisticated music, I just need a canvas for my ears and soul to draw on, I can fill in the blanks or dream up harmonies on my own. > An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported. True, but also a.) it doesn't stop there. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if a simple "gridlike" composition makes me sad, happy or gives me goosebumps, that's "soul enough" for me. Even the soul of a simpleton is still a soul :) b.) the computer enables composer and interpret to be the same person.. and if they so desire, they can put endless amounts of detail and emotion into a piece. Personally I have no doubt that people like Mozart would have been all over computers as an instrument, and the wide range of expression they offer already.
      - holri 13y ago
        The problem lies in the context. If we speak to each other we take human context into account. So does a musical interpret. It is just another medium. Music instead of words. A computer does not understand human context. This has already be proven by Weizenbaum with his program Eliza. If the Computer does not understand emotion, he does not understand how to create music. There is no possibility to formalize music exactly, so that a computer can play it accordingly. I doubt that this will ever be possible because a true artist takes human context into account in his performance. So there is no static formalization of music. The only solution would be that the composer plays live on the computer. But an instrument that can not be played by humans is useless in this situation.
  - pit 13y ago
    What about a recording versus a live performance? Isn't a MIDI essentially a super-low-resolution digital recording, minus any spatial acoustic noise? Is soul then contained in space, or the presence of those souls present? Here's an idea for a test: start with a song recorded at 44100Hz (standard CD quality) that has soul. We can debate the actual piece of music, but I'll use "Clap Your Hands" by A Tribe Called Quest in this example. Give a bunch of people a randomly-downsampled version of the song (at 12500Hz, 800Hz, 220Hz, etc), and have them answer a simple question: "Does this have soul?" The song is 93BPM, or 1.55 beats per second. At a sample rate of 1.55Hz, we're looking at one sample per beat. Let's use a standard 16-step sequencer and say that a MIDIfied approximation is going to have four samples per beat (quarter notes). So, at about 6.2Hz, we've got a recording that has no better resolution than MIDI (potentially even worse). Ultimately, I guess I agree with you: "soul" is in the ear of the beholder. (Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about digital audio.)
- vidarh 13y ago
  And all your experience tells us is that the Ti99/4A did not have good sound chips and/or you are not good at writing music for it. Meanwhile, I still listen to certain C64 music regularly that I greatly enjoy, because the composer knew how to extract great music even from something as limited as that.
  - holri 13y ago
    No, the TI99/4A had no understanding of music. You have to have emotions to understand music. A Computer does not have emotions.

tesseractive 13y ago

So does that mean that piano music played on an insufficiently fancy piano is soulless as well?

holri 13y ago
I have a Kawai MP10 digital Piano and an old hand made analog Hofmann piano. If I play for example just the last Chord (6 Notes) of Chopin Prelude op. 28/4 on the Hofmann the music goes deep through every nerve. Nothing comparable happens on the Kawai even with very good speakers.
- tesseractive 13y ago
  Are you saying that those 2 data points constitute a spanning set of the possibilities?
  - holri 13y ago
    Do you understand the concept of a example?
- yongjik 13y ago
  That's what people who buy monster ethernet cables say.
- bane 13y ago
  Bad musicians frequently blame the instruments.
  - holri 13y ago
    You mean good musicians do not distinguish good and bad instruments?
    - bane 13y ago
      A good musician can play world class music on a rusty spoon, a used pie plate and a one-string-out-of-tune-$20-guitar. Crap musicians are those that rely on fancy instruments to make up for their lack of basic musicianship. Even a drunk martini bar pianist can sound halfway decent on a $70k Steinway or Bösendorfer.