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Unrefined "Musician" Gains a Global Audience
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "An unskilled musician performed a catchy pop instrumental for more than one million YouTube users even though he can't play a lick of drums or piano. The 22-year-old Norwegian's tool was stop-motion video, WSJ.com reports. From the article: 'To make "Amateur," Mr. Gjertsen recorded each analog beat and note one by one on video. He transferred the sounds from each video clip into audio files, which he could rearrange with the Fruity Loops sound-editing program — the same software he's used to create his all-digital music in the past. After organizing the sound files into the right order, Mr. Gjertsen reconstructed the pattern with the original video files. In the final product, he insists, nothing about his performance was digitally enhanced. "You have the original sounds from the video," he says.'"
Just because he can't play piano or drums, he clearly still knows what sounds good, has a sense of beat, tempo, and melody, and knows how to use editing software.
I'd wager most modern music is made just like that, and involves a lot of people who would meet this definition of "unskilled" musician.
Its the hair, man.
He should take it on the road!
That's essentially the concept of IDM; taking sounds from different sources that shouldn't work in any coherent sense and making them come together musically. This doesn't even go that far, sampling's been around for years. Also, "musician" refers not only to those who can play musical instruments, but also to those who compose musical works. He fits the criteria, as far as I can tell.
His skill at turning someone with zero musical performance skill into something entertaining and presentable shows he could get a job as a pop music producer. Hell, he can't do any worse than the pimps who churn out the pop tarts we see on stage today!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This reminds me of the tracker modules that saw a lot of use on the Amiga.
http://outcampaign.org/
Another example of a great piece of music (or something like it) that only works when accompanied by video. We'll be seeing more and more developments in this direction thanks to Youtube! See Chuck Klostermann's recent article in Esquire for a full dissection.
So basically he made a MIDI track using live instrument samples?
Now this is cutting edge stuff here - simply by dictating what pitch, how long, and when notes should be played, he was able to "perform" an entire song!!
Can you imagine the potential of this? Why, you could be an entire orchestra by yourself! In fact, you could even perform this kind of trick LIVE - simply substitute musicians skilled in their instruments for the samples, and in order to "control" them, you could provide them with the musical instructions somehow on paper. Of course you'd have to implement some kind of global timer to keep them all together, but it seems very doable!
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
If someone submitted the link to this video a month ago when it first appeared on blogs and Digg etc it wouldn't have been accepted as a story on Slashdot. Funny how the Wall Street Journal's description of the video, spare interview, and short backstory showcasing their world-class investigative journalism (the same that doggedly followed the Enron debacle) makes this YouTube clip a legitimate story to post on Slashdot's front page.
I'm not complaining about it being here, or complaining that the Wall Street Journal submits its own stuff. Just funny how a random link becomes legitimate, that's all.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Yeah, thanks, I saw that same link in the summary.
By the way, it isn't "Fruity Loops" anymore - it's "FL Studio", and has been for a number of years. Sanitarium objected to the original name.
The software designers thought it was unlikely that anyone would confuse their sequencing software with a breakfast cereal, but apparently Sanitarium had in mind a situation in which they might want to give away CDs with cereal.
Also, they discovered that IT executives tended to fall about laughing when they told them the name of the software.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
Use the Video Downloader firefox plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
Then use VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ to play the resulting file.
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
Mod files were the old amiga standard for doing this, except they didn't have much space for samples so all tonal instruments were just one sample played at different rates. It was amazing what could be done with just four notes at once. A song was typically 100 KB.
Nice to see what the little man in the synthesizer actually looks like, though.
Bring on the remixes ... a little star wars kid action and we got a serious music video!
This kid really is awesome. His editing skills are unreal.
Check out his MySpace page. He has other material apparently.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
1. He is unskilled musician. The others were highly skilled musicians.
2. They didn't also have the video sample as well - only audio.
3. They didn't post it on YouTube.
exit out of X, recompile your kernel with the correct modules (make sure you run make clean and make mrproper first). edit grub to load the new kernel, reboot and you should be all set.
if that does not work, grab a live cd and burn it on yout back up machine (you had one right?) boot up your machine from the live cd then mount the hdd and modify grub to load the old kernel. its as simple as that.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
While actual mechanical skill with an instrument belongs to one level, composing and arranging belong to a wholly different level. I'd even go as far to venture that both rely on completely different sets of brain matter. Speaking from personal experience, i may be able to shred guitar with the best of them (okay, i might be exaggerating a bit), but i really hit a wall when i try to arrange something, especially if it has many layers of instrumentation, melody, harmony, etc. That guy is a master arranger in his own right.
He has plenty of good videos - another of his, Hyperactive uses the same technique to a similar effect.
Never mind, it's on Google video.
What the h*ck do you think MIDI is? Or tracked music? Or Mellotron? Or Fairlight?
jealous much ? everybody going "all he did was blah blah blah"
iam sure you can compile a Kernel or put a new skin on KDE but can you do what he did ? and if its so easy lets see your version iam sure you have loads of music and creative videos you edited right ?
is that crickets i hear or the sound of tumbleweed ?
to some people hardcore ASM code is an art to others its mindnumbing shite, Art takes many forms how many can you master ?
The open-source incarnation of the tracker concept would be Modplug Tracker combined with Audacity. It has VST support and other things that electronic musicians would expect from a studio application, with the efficient interface only a tracker provides. It's also only $0 and under a free software license, which is trivial compared to Renoise, which is something like $60 for the fully functional version. [/ad]
A few months and who knows?
The man is skilled. Skilled at sampling and editing. He's not, however, a skilled musician.
I'm sorry, you're mistaken.
The only things your argument establishes is that he is not a talented drummer or pianist. A musician is someone who makes music, and for the purposes of defining the term, I couldn't give a shit how it's made.
The Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin contains, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful "music" made in the last decade using techniques very similar, in principle, to the ones this guy is using. I'm thrilled to see that new tools are allowing different people to become musicians in brand new ways.
So he sampled sounds, put them in a "sequencer" and created a pattern appealing to the ear.
Ahh, what a question. In my day we would have put it this way:
But is it art?
After all, the same could be said of Beethoven:
All he did was imagine sounds, write them in the right sequence on paper and create a pattern appealing to the ear.
...just another kraut doing this 200 years ago!
And, yes, you are missing something!
He is unskilled musician.
I have always relied on the definition of music as it was taught to me by my first college music professor: "Music is sounds and silence organised in time".
As far as I'm concerned this guy is very skilled at organising sounds and silence in time. Ergo, he's a skilled musician. He's just not a skilled instrumentalist.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
It's obvious from some of the comments that posters haven't seen his work. He's one of the most creative artists I've seen on YouTube. From the pointless and bizarre Den Lille Valpen, to the simple humor of US, to the amazing production values on Jeg går en Tur. And the guy is only 22.
Personally, I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
cLive ;-)
ps - oh, and the "Your mother is a" Slutt joke is quite funny too...
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
He's not a pianist or a drummer, that's for sure, but he's a hell of a musician. In that he makes music. That doesn't imply any skill at any particular instrument, although in this case, I think it's quite arguable that the computer is his instrument.
Although new instruments have had a history of being rejected by more conventional instrument players whenever they're introduced, I would have hoped that we'd moved beyond that now. (Did you know what harpsicord players thought of the piano when it was first introduced? It wasn't flattering, I'll bet.) Keyboards, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and other electronic devices are all valid tools for a musician to use. For that matter, so are 55-gallon drums and PVC pipe, at the other end of the spectrum.
This guy made music; therefore he is a musician. The fact that you think that 'anybody' could do this is irrelevant; everybody isn't doing this, or it wouldn't be notable and other people wouldn't be listening to it. Acting haughty because he doesn't have conventional instrumental skills is ridiculous.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When I was watching the linked video I had a random idea... what if people put together a (Creative Commons?) library of short video clips like that for some of the instruments used in MIDI files? For example, you could have short video samples of people playing notes for the piano, trumpet, vocals, etc. Then, given a MIDI file you could automatically generate a video like the one Mr. Gjertsen did, perhaps having a separate split-screen for each MIDI channel.
If nothing else, it'd be a cool thing to have on display at parties.
In case you haven't realized it yet, not everything posted on /. is earth-shattering news. This video was neat. I enjoyed watching it. I bet he enjoyed making it. All is well with the world. Relax.
I disagree with just about everyone in this thread re: definition of musician vs. composer vs. editor etc., but I'm replying to you because I feel that this point of view is particularly damaging to good, original, modern music, and it's acceptance by a wider audience.
No one, other than academics who over intellectualize most music, really cares whether there is a 12-tone row in a piece of music. Why would you expect one to show up in a song by Aphex Twin? Would it make it a better piece of music? Aperiodic rhythms? Who cares?
Music is judged by the vast majority of people in subjective, opinionated terms. Arguing that someone should justify the use of sampling in music by citing an unknown, and in most people's opinion unlistenable (though innovative), composer is ridiculous. I appreciate those on the vanguard like Stockhausen for pushing boundaries and bringing new ideas to the table, but that doesn't necessarily make what they do 'good' music in a conventional (i.e. layman's) sense.
You sound like a pompous asshole. I guess what bothers me most is the tone of superiority that is expressed through statements like yours and by most people who hold similar opinions, and the insinuation that if someone disagrees they are stupid and wrong. It does nothing to encourage communication and exchange of ideas, and everything to turn people off of the fringe completely.
He was being cymbolic. Don't have a tympani tantrum, hehehehe
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
How many of you clowns pooh-poohing this guy's composition because it's "just editing" would bee messing your drawers in awe if the music in question was (say) the original 1963 theme to Doctor Who? You know, the one Delia Derbyshire composed and "recorded" by physically cutting and splicing (in some cases) individual notes recorded on magnetic tape?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Revised news summary:
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
How did YOU think he became deaf?
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
The mellotron is present in lots and LOTS of progressive rock music. Groups like Spock's Beard and Porcupine Tree use the mellotron all over the place. Hell, in Porcupine Tree's latest album, Deadwing, there's even a track called "Mellotron Scratch."
You've reminded me of a story.
About a dozen years ago, I went to New York with my then-girlfriend. We decided to go to the Met.
At the time I had long fuzzy hair, was only halfway bald, and wore fairly eccentric collegey clothes. A denim jacket, ripped jeans, loud shirts, etc. In short, I looked moderately freaky.
So we go to the met. Oh yeah, did I mention we had been drinking?
I decide to have a little fun with my girlfriend. As I would approach a work of art, I would make a comment as a joke. Something an art-type would be likely to say. And I was mildly drunk, so I was probably a bit louder than I normally would have been.
"It's artistic without being artsy."
"I like what he's saying with his green palette."
"It says a lot by saying a little, don't you think?"
The punchline? Since I was drunkish/loud, other people could hear me. And since I looked like a freak and was making these possibly insightful comments, they were agreeing with me, sometimes furiously. "Oh yes, I see it too!" Rather than possibly snub some super-insightful art weirdo, they decided the safest course was to agree with me.
A drunken electrical engineer on holiday.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I guess I'm dissing an attitude. The attitude that there is more value in buying a bunch of Britney Spears and 50c albums than there is in buying an instrument and going and making music.
I'm dissing the entire recorded music market. The idea that you go on tour for years in shitty venues for peanuts trying to advertise your recordings as a product.
Recordings are the fucking advertisement, not the real value. Listening to an album is a poor substitute for the dynamic of creation or live appreciation of the dynamic of creation, and anyone who gets exposed to both bloody well knows it.
This big protectionist racket is propped up by a presumption that there is merit in continuing to run this big engine that elevates and polishes a few acts, then enforces distance between the audience and the performer.
They're fucking teaching kids in schools that if we don't keep spending our money on CDs, no one will make music anymore. WTF?!?
I think if we want more music, we'd get a fuck of a lot more if we stopped selling the masses crap gear and keeping the good stuff for the pros. Good stuff is expensive because it's more expensive to make, but it's also more expensive because good stuff doesn't get economies of scale, just the cruddy stuff that the uninformed and poor are willing to accept.
At the end of the day, it's a big culture that enshrines the few and has the masses encouraged to appreciate rather than participate, and it pisses me off.
I spend money supporting musicians. But not by buying CDs or sitting in stadiums. I give my money to the guys who are going to grin and make eye contact when I and a bunch of others are rocking out in front of them, jam out some new stuff no one has ever heard before, adapt their set to the feedback coming from the audience, then come smoke a doob between sets. Because having those people continue to go out among us and interact with us in that way is where the value resides.
In truth, having them get rich and fat selling pale copies of that experience, forced by contract to play only precomposed work in stadiums where there are so many people kept so far away that no one actually connects, I don't think that holds any value at all. I'd go so far as to say once that happens, you've deprived the entire world of actually getting the real value inherent in those artists existance.
I'm all ranted out. I'm going to go play. Thanks for the kudos, I respect that you're out there making it happen.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth