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I'm an instrument designer (Ambient Addition, One-Bit Groovebox, Exertion Instruments, PSPKick, etc.) and you're right. Jaron Lanier in the OP is right. Tradi

by diydsp 12y ago

I'm an instrument designer (Ambient Addition, One-Bit Groovebox, Exertion Instruments, PSPKick, etc.) and you're right. Jaron Lanier in the OP is right. Traditional instruments evolved around expressivity of physical phenomena; particular configurations of vibrations. Electronics (and computers) are great for information, but information doesn't resonate at audible frequencies, and it doesn't respond to human movement. Yes, theremin - but it's two-dimensional and it's not a physical system of the same species. it's an isolated physical oscillation with severely constrained external influence. Synthesizers sound great, but only through heaps of patch design and only modulars begin to bring tangible structure that any simple string instrument has. And even then, players aren't manipulating the electricity in its own medium, but operating at an abstraction. Modern music has now nearly completely re-inherited the legacy of personal computing and thus we have one-man workstation music. You're doubly and triply right about that awful trope of the one-man band and more importantly about the price scales of instruments, beginning cheap for kids who have more time and imagination than money. My current approach is to regress to guitar-like instruments outfitted with embedded synthesizers. I recently showed one at a gallery show embedded in a cigar box. It doesn't have exhaustive sensors (only pressure and pitch), but it has other affordances which yank electronic music back into the domain of open-ended interpersonal vibration as opposed to vending machines for dance music .aiff files :) Expressivity is often overly-focused on multi-modal, high resolution sensor inputs when it's really more about the ability and freedom to respond to the energy of a performance. Glove controllers usually fall down for the same reasons: they merely map a few parameters of an intricate process to cartesian movement like slot-car racetracks with no means to fail or they suffer from a lack of feedback - a symptom they share in all computer user interface applications - or they're simply too general and users (vs. musicans, ha!) spend all their configuring and no time rockin'. Individual virtuosos aren't as important to me as seeing small groups of electronic musicians in true collaborative performance. My best example so far was in fact made with Imogen Heap's collaborator Kelly Snook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNgyMfH3E9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNgyMfH3E9Q A less precise, but larger group is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDYabnu10qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDYabnu10qk

bane 12y ago
Great videos. Definitely not virtuostic, but fun. It's harder to define the kind of virtuoso performance in a group, which may be why full orchestra digital synths have made more convincing progress than individual instrument performances. There are also some "easier" traditional instruments to target. A Hurdy Gurdy for example has far fewer modes of expression than a violin does and might be a nice physical model to base an instrument off of, in fact it's not too different than the Electric Eel you pointed out in your videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8zGZJQ5yps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8zGZJQ5yps Which of course provides an entirely different set of expressible performance options than even something like a Nyckelharpa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sfBcWvVUbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sfBcWvVUbs > Yes, theremin I've always hated the way theremins sound. There's an aspect to the sound, a buzzing sliding sound inherent in the instrument that I could never quite cotton onto. It reminds me a bit of electric violins which I toyed around with a little as a teenager. Something about the way they work eliminates quite a bit of the performance.
- diydsp 12y ago
  > the way theremins sound. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say it may partly be due to the lack of transients, which again, goes back to the replacement of a physical process with an oversimplified informational model. In general, the ear is much more sensitive to the transient portion of sound than to the main oscillation. Many sounds can be synthesized with the same exact continuous waveform, but with different attacks, mainly due to the masking effects of the ear. Not to say Theremin doesn't have its place, but it has numerous issues and definitely deserves to evolve. Thanks for the nyckelharpa video. I had definitely seen it before, but the significance hadn't been as strong then :) Seeing that inspiring performance in the context of this conversation was valuable! In the past, I've been very conservative about avoiding corny and campy music tropes - there are way too many "wacky" novelty instruments, so I've avoided hurdy-gurdies, believing they had some kind of non-serious association (just listen to the name?!). As you pointed out, the leap from Electric Eel to Hurdy-Gurdy is almost trivial. So perhaps at some point I will loosen up and build some "digital hurdy-gurdies." In fact, one of my favorite instruments both conceptually and acoustically, is the autoharp. Perhaps I could combine the autoharp, nyckelharpa and hurdy-gurdy into something fresh. In the meantime, I've been concentrating on that "transients and physical systems" problem. As we know, the traditional electronic envelope model, ADSR, is tremendously conservative and unashamedly uni-dimensional. Inspired by Venkatesh Rao's book, "Tempo," I'm trying to make a model of envelopes which is more like a weather system than bouncing ball.

by diydsp 12y ago

bane 12y ago

Great videos. Definitely not virtuostic, but fun. It's harder to define the kind of virtuoso performance in a group, which may be why full orchestra digital synths have made more convincing progress than individual instrument performances. There are also some "easier" traditional instruments to target. A Hurdy Gurdy for example has far fewer modes of expression than a violin does and might be a nice physical model to base an instrument off of, in fact it's not too different than the Electric Eel you pointed out in your videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8zGZJQ5yps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8zGZJQ5yps Which of course provides an entirely different set of expressible performance options than even something like a Nyckelharpa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sfBcWvVUbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sfBcWvVUbs > Yes, theremin I've always hated the way theremins sound. There's an aspect to the sound, a buzzing sliding sound inherent in the instrument that I could never quite cotton onto. It reminds me a bit of electric violins which I toyed around with a little as a teenager. Something about the way they work eliminates quite a bit of the performance.

diydsp 12y ago
> the way theremins sound. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say it may partly be due to the lack of transients, which again, goes back to the replacement of a physical process with an oversimplified informational model. In general, the ear is much more sensitive to the transient portion of sound than to the main oscillation. Many sounds can be synthesized with the same exact continuous waveform, but with different attacks, mainly due to the masking effects of the ear. Not to say Theremin doesn't have its place, but it has numerous issues and definitely deserves to evolve. Thanks for the nyckelharpa video. I had definitely seen it before, but the significance hadn't been as strong then :) Seeing that inspiring performance in the context of this conversation was valuable! In the past, I've been very conservative about avoiding corny and campy music tropes - there are way too many "wacky" novelty instruments, so I've avoided hurdy-gurdies, believing they had some kind of non-serious association (just listen to the name?!). As you pointed out, the leap from Electric Eel to Hurdy-Gurdy is almost trivial. So perhaps at some point I will loosen up and build some "digital hurdy-gurdies." In fact, one of my favorite instruments both conceptually and acoustically, is the autoharp. Perhaps I could combine the autoharp, nyckelharpa and hurdy-gurdy into something fresh. In the meantime, I've been concentrating on that "transients and physical systems" problem. As we know, the traditional electronic envelope model, ADSR, is tremendously conservative and unashamedly uni-dimensional. Inspired by Venkatesh Rao's book, "Tempo," I'm trying to make a model of envelopes which is more like a weather system than bouncing ball.