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Ask Slashdot: Resolving the Clash Between Art and Technology In Music?
An anonymous reader writes This article in The New York Times shows the clash of purists and people who desire to experiment with "new technology" available to them. The geek in me is really curious about this concept of a digital orchestra (with the ability to change tempos, placement of speakers in an orchestra pit, possibly delaying some to line them up ...). I understand that instrumentalists feel threatened, but why not let free enterprise decide the fate of this endeavor instead of trying to kill it by using blackmail and misrepresentation? Isn't there a place for this, even if maybe it is not called opera ... maybe iOpera?
Again.
All this machinery making modern music
Can still be open-hearted
Not so coldly charted it's really just
A question of your honesty, yeah, your honesty
Rush, The Spirit of Radio. Full lyrics easily found elsewhere. This was the first thing that popped into mind when I saw the summary. That was recorded in 1979 and released in 1980 according to Wiki.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"That's not music, Martelli. That's masturbation"
Fame, 1080
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
By order of the prophet We ban that boogie sound Degenerate the faithful With that crazy Casbah sound But the Bedouin they brought out The electric camel drum The local guitar picker Got his guitar picking thumb As soon as the shareef Had cleared the square They began to wail
PlanetVulkan.com
I personally don't find the sampled sounds to be as nice to my ears. But the threat of boycotts, coercion and retaliation against artists that choose to use a new medium is nothing more than unionism to protect salary and I find *that* despicable.
I may be older than the bulk of the /. crowd, but some of my favorite music simply *cannot* be played by an orchestra. I remember when they had the same lame outcry against electronic instruments.
Probably a good number of the engineers designing digital orchestra hardware and software might be keen on exploring new possibilities in music, but the suits who have chosen to use them to replace live musicians in musicals, and now this opera production, are thinking first and foremost about how much money they can save when they don't have to pay human beings any more. I have no particular opinion on the use of digital orchestras, but I wish their use were motivated by something deeper than filthy lucre.
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Well, drummers still have a lot of work, and drum machines are a rare site nowadays.
Speakers sound like shit. They are thin sounding, no exceptions. The debate of whether or not 320kb/s aacs sound indistinguishable from cds is moot when you compare any recorded sound to the real thing. I can imagine Data playing great violin, but speakers that sound like RealLife will require some kind of instantaneously morphing nanotechnology or something.
Because it always makes the most sensible and valuable decisions. Indeed, let "free enterprise" decide ALL aspects of life!
Are these people looking for stagnation? I suspect that new technology will produce all kinds of horrors (think synth and drum machines in the 80s) but all kinds of interesting things will no doubt come out. The music and the technology that make the music should be an endless dance. Acapella continues to amaze and that is about as technology free as possible, yet some acapella is generated by having a single singer and playing games in the recording studio.
Some painters use amazing techniques to blend and layer very complex paints and lacquers to great result; yet Picasso apparently used a common house paint for some of his greatest works.
Often the medium is the message. For instance if a wood carver is working with wood they might allow changes in the grain of the wood to dictate what they are doing potentially resulting in beautiful art. Yet putting a block of wood into a CAM machine and allowing a 3D design to be precisely cut can generate a whole different and also pleasing result. One or the other is not necessarily wrong, just different.
So if a purist wants to be pure then they should have fun with whatever purists that want to play with them; but the moment that they tell another artist to stop what they are doing then it is no longer art but a stagnant religion.
Let me start by saying that I think anybody should be free to put on whatever kind of performance they want, and if people come and pay for tickets, so they make money -- terrific.
But this whole thing is a little weird to me. The entire style of singing in traditional opera (especially Wagner, which is what this particular story is about) is predicated on traditional acoustics, without electronic enhancement. Those crazy warbling sopranos do so to differentiate themselves timbrally from the orchestra and allow their voices to get to the audience. A singer otherwise would often get lost among the wash of sound from a 100 orchestral instruments.
So, if you want to get rid of the acoustic instruments, why the devil keep the operatic vocal performances the same? Give the singers microphones and let them perform in varying vocal styles, as done in most pop music and on Broadway these days.
This all strikes me as an incredibly odd project -- they're going to replace musicians with oodles of speakers pointed in various directions to simulate musicians playing? All of this technology to propagate an art form whose style of performance and singing is predicated on acoustic real-life performance?
And why bother with all the sampling at all? Why not just hire real musicians to perform, record them, and then play that back with just the singers doing their thing? Surely the investment that's going into this to figure out how to place oodles of speakers, getting all that sound equipment, etc. could probably pay for a one-time investment in a decent karaoke-style recording of actual instruments?
From TFA:
Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in New York, likened it to operatic karaoke.
That sounds precisely like what it is. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- if they can get somebody to pay for it, why not? I don't get why the heck anyone would want to do with opera, whose aesthetic is all about low-tech, but whatever floats your boat.
For the purists, there is one further question, though:
Staging a "Ring" cycle in Connecticut with a digital orchestra is the dream of Charles M. Goldstein, a musician and would-be impresario who was once an extra chorister at the Met, and who founded the Hartford Wagner Festival with the idea that one day Connecticut could become the only place outside of Bayreuth, Germany, to perform entire "Ring" cycles every year. He argued that there was no loss of jobs for musicians because, from the outset, he had never planned to use live players in the pit.
Here's the problem -- what does "perform" mean? Literally, from its etymological roots, it means to put something into its final form. Actual live music depends on responsiveness between singers and conductors and orchestra. Nothing is ever quite the same twice -- and that is often one of the cool things about live music.
This guy is proposing to "perform" pieces by using canned sampled pre-recorded "orchestras" (if I understand it correctly). I'm not saying it isn't an interesting idea, but why do it with Wagner or traditional opera at all? Is there really an audience who really wants to see effectively a dressed-up opera karaoke?
Technologies need to bring new art paradigms to be accepted as a novelty rather than a threat to traditional usages and and current actors.
I'm in the NYC music scene and have also been around to different music scenes in the USA. I've never heard of this clash the NY Times is reporting on. I'm in the experimental/electronic music scene but I interact with classical and traditional musicians. I have never experienced any clash, tension, or one upmanship between different genres of musicians. On the contrary, I've found a respectful appreciation for the artistic contributions of everyone in the music scene. Not sure where they are getting this idea?
This isn't a clash of tech and music, it's a clash of the customer's expectations for live music and the product being delivered.
When it comes to opera and orchestra, if I'm in the audience I expect to see the source of the sounds I hear. That's why I'm paying to go see it live rather than sit at home on my stereo. If I hear a symbol clash I should be able to look out into the orchestra and see a guy hitting a symbol. Cutting some of this out is not delivering the experience that people expect. The character of individual live orchestras is very much a large part of the experience to hearing this type of music live. Hearing sound samples from the New York philharmonic when you're in Chicago absolutely does cheapen the experience.
On the other hand, if the sounds can't be replicated by humans then of course it's fine to use backing tracks. That's the unspoken agreement that exists for all live music, is it not? If a rock band is using an orchestral backing track, that's reasonable. If a rock band is piping in a pre-recorded guitar solo, people are going to be disappointed. Even at electronica shows the audience expects the artist to do as much live as he can (leading to the classic scenario of a DJ pretending to twist knobs and punch buttons that aren't even hooked into anything).
Tron was disqualified from receiving an Academy Award nomination for special effects, because the Academy felt at the time that using computers was "cheating".
When it comes to downloading music, suddenly the free market isn't good enough for this crowd.
holy shit the ads on here suck. I leave /. front page open often and god damn.. so many new windows and audio crap. it's worse than any other website I go to regularly. wtf happened?
It's the clash between prerecorded samples and real live instruments.
The margin, it's called.
Opera attendance in America is dropping off dramatically. Most of the audience are older women and couples. Over 50. The opera community is having a very hard time attracting younger members. Competition of other types of music and high ticket prices.
So I think what this person is trying to do is great. It probably won't be a success. But it may draw new audience members in.
Once when I complained about modern classical music to a friend of mine who composes new symphonies, he said:
"Traditional classical music has had time to filter out all the bad symphonies leaving just the best. With modern classical we are listening to it in real time. All the new compositions and ideas, good and bad. Isn't that exciting."
RLH
Have been doing music composition for decades (first analog, the old style, and since the 1980's I've been adopting the digital technology into music composition) and I can tell you that there are pros and cons from both sides
The electronic music scene might have had at least 2 decades of development - for some, it's matured enough, that whatever they need, there are libraries that they can tap into, but for others, there are things that they can do the old style way are still not available digitally and/or what is available on the digital side are not flexible enough
It ain't a horse whip versus pedal - it's all about the completeness of the ecosystem
It's hard to see MIDI accompaniment as "new technology."
Player piano rolls were edited to achieve a kind of mechanical perfection in performance or to weave in showy theatrical effects no human keyboardist could produce. The problems begin when you to try to synchronize a live performance to a recording.
For greater economies outside the major cities, you could simply dispense with the sets and local casting and show the movie.
"Art" is a very subjective thing. And coming up with a novel way to use technology to create art, isn't that art by itself? The first person to discover that you could create music with a Gameboy sure was an artist.
It's questionable, though, if the thousands that copied him, are.
Art, like everything, evolves. Develops. Some say that one of the "duties" of art is to break down boundaries, to evoke a reaction from the one consuming it, to stir emotions and to make people think. All this does actually require that art reaches for new ways to express itself. And one of them is by definition technology. Technology is usually the spearhead of human development, the "newest of the new". It's only logical that technology will be used to create art if new art is what you are aiming at.
That is one side of the coin.
The other one is how art is used to make content creation easy. Note how "art" is absent from the previous sentence. Technology is more and more used as a substitute for artistic and creative ability. One of the most blatant examples thereof is autotune. If you don't know it, google it. Autotune has been abused far too many times by people who have exactly zero voice to create something that can be listened to without creating the pressing urge to puncture your ear drums. Still, it can be used in artistic ways. If you want an example of a GOOD use of autotune, take "Believe" from Cher. You may like her or not, but this was a creative, artistic way to use a tool that is usually just abused by talent free morons to create content.
Technology, as always, is neither good nor bad when it comes to art. Its use is what matters.
As usual.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...but why not let free enterprise decide the fate of this endeavor instead of trying to kill it...
Really, you don't get why? Let's put this in another context then. Do you get why offshoring tech jobs is bad? And why people don't want to participate, training their Chinese or Indian replacement? But that's just "free enterprise deciding" isn't?
If you can't wrap your head around that one, how about the idea that the workers are also a part of the "free enterprise" equation? The workers deciding not to support this is free enterprise deciding. Free enterprise isn't solely about consumers.
Because e- is for Electronic. Unless the Internet (or, <deity> forbid, Apple) had something to do with it.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Threatening someone that if they do X, you won't hire them and will do your best to convince others not to hire them, is perfectly compatible with a free market. In some regulated markets it might not be allowed (e.g. some such tactics might fall afoul of anti-trust or collusion laws), but in a completely free market, such tactics would be allowed.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I went to a live jazz concert last night and sat about 3 feet from the pianist. It's definitely not the same as sitting by a loudspeaker.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra used a virtual version of itself to reach out to new potential audience members. This was using real audio and footage though - reassembled into an interractive experience. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s...
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I think the real dichotomy is more between modern composition and older works. I'm only interested in listening to Wagner or Mozart for so long, at some point I'd like to hear something that's fresh. But many of the modern composers seemed to me have lost sight of what sounds good, preferring to take some kind of conceptual approach that may be of interest to other composers but I find often isn't very interesting to listen to. After the likes of Xenakis, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and a few others, I found it to be mostly elitist insider music, and tuned out. And I'm a musician myself, but that kind of stuff just lost me. I now listen more to Chris Clark, Peter Scherer, and maybe John Zorn and some ethnic-fusion experimenters, Jazz and electronica artists and a few others who at least haven't lost sight of what sounds interesting. As far as I'm concerned, "purists" of any kind are tending towards boring. If you see your art as a museum piece be a purist and re-create that which has come before. But as I think Grace Slick once said, "Van Gogh never had to paint a painting twice."
Round one: Digital music replaces musicians. Actors and audience don't much care.
Round two: Holograms replace actors. Audience doesn't much care.
Round three: Virtual audience replaces real audience. Real audience doesn't even notice, as the computers find that the all-digital performance can be optimized by running the simulation at many times real life speed. Der Ring des Nibelungen takes only 1.5 seconds in the new theater.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
On one hand, in a recording or composing environment, I would not be able to compose without technology assisting me. I just don't have the capacity to play every orchestral and rock instrument every time I need to quickly lay-down a track. Nor call someone at 3:00am to blast out a trumpet solo.
However, it seems bizarre when you apply that to live work, I did that a number of times in my early career and I found it horrid trying to play a soulful guitar solo *with an audience* when the backing is electronic. You have to follow the machine. It is now in charge. There's a fundamental disconnect. It's been documented in various psych papers, or at least you can infer it from the research. Trained musicians brains grow differently, and furthermore, the more a musician improvises, the more the brain changes.
It seems to stem from money, and ego. Thus:
Let's replace musicians with robots. Humans are too expensive. :)
Same with the engineers. Computers could do far more responsive and accurate sound design. And cheaper, obviously.
Stage management can/is being automated. That will cut more expenditure.
Logistics will/is being automated. Keep costs down
Then we should replace the composers with algorithms derived from some program studying all music available. No having to pay a non-deserving rent-seeking leech, then
Of course, the audience are not a good judge of things such as musicianship, either. In fact, most sheeple suck. They should be replaced with robots. Cuts down on catering costs, too!
That just leaves a lip-syncing performer, and the management. (Most of which will be replaced by AI, too).
It's bizarre, but it seems to be going in that direction, and rather quickly.
control that "I" have on my clarinets (or trombone, for that matter). Albeit amateur hour in my case, I not only make digital instruments (to be discarded at whim) but I practice hard to play (ie. Intonation) ... to play is not merely to play a game. Like learning to speak, there is a point where you attain fluency and maybe even grace. I've made some 'interesting' music with digital machines, but much more interesting analog machines to make music and playing, is playing, after all.
...as long as that guy is in the pit playing the theater organ live while the movie plays, it'll be fine.
There's no way a 'recorded' music & sound effects score playing along with the movie could ever sound as good.
(sorry for the Anon Coward post, on a friend's computer)
Yes, this. Very true.
I work doing music for games and tv shows. We find two things: first, skilled musicians can get much more interesting and varied sounds from their instruments than can be managed from samples (usually the Vienna Symphonic Library). Not talking extended techniques.
Second, it's waaaay quicker and easier to get a live group to adjust and adapt their dynamics and tempos than it is for me to fiddle with settings. That is, I can take two days to get music to match and sync with an action sequence. Or some musicians can do the same in three ten minute takes, responding to my verbal directions and using their skill to make it interesting.
If you do the math, it's significantly cheaper to pay a *union* scale 45-person orchestra for 3 hours of studio work, than to pay me to mess around with my gear for two weeks (which is what it can take for a show or part of a game). About 1/2 to 2/3 the cost, usually.
Plus it will sound way better.
I like it better too. I love writing the music, but it's very tedious and soul-crushing to digitally match the music to a video. That's what musicians are for, IMHO.
Symphonic, operatic, and chamber music at the world-class level is about nuance that only educated ears will understand. It's already a small market. That market is likely to balk at the use of electronics. That's ok.
People who don't care if it's electronic should go ahead and enjoy whatever they think they like.
However, don't tell me for a second that some computer can match the transcendent quality of a lifelong trained live orchestra and soloist for nuance, presence, and artistry. The instant you argue that, I'm already convinced you don't know shit about the art form. You can certainly tell me that you like it, or even that new music can be made with such tools, but simply don't be foolish enough to try to convince me that computers are better musicians than people.
Speaking as a singer, the machine orchestra needs to track and anticipate solutions to the singers variation of rhythm, pitch and dynamics. The singer is carefully monitoring the audience and deciding when a strict rhythm is needed to set up their expectations so that he can express by slowing down or speeding up their rhythms or using slightly blue notes or by changing the level of sound or even the nature of the phoneme that he is yelling. He is actually using the audience's pattern judgement to draw them into his performance. Normally when singing with an accompanist it is really a duet, as the singer is depending on the accompanist to read him and anticipate what he is trying to do. The conductor tracks him and will communicate his changes of tempo and dynamic to the orchestra with judgements on how to complete the ensemble. Karaoke is not very pleasing as it is like being frog marched through the music because there is no non verbal consensus on how the music will develop. So if i am working for an audience who has consented to listen to me, i want some sort of intelligence behind me tracking my decisions and forming a reasonable background for them which also has at least a fractal ability to delight the audience. Speaking as a journeyman pipe organ builder, the onset of new technologies tend to speciate methods and instruments of music. If you add a keyboard to a harp, you are no longer hands on and you have a harpsichord. What you lose in dynamics you gain in control of damping. In pipe organs we have seen electrification of actions, electronic tone generation, sampling, midi control of the instrument and these have all spawned different methods of play and different instruments. You have the electric action pipe organ, the jazz organ, samples you can download and play on your home computer and synthesizers which are a different instrument from where you started. And yet there are still a handful of pipe organ shops in the United States that build tracker (mechanical) organs which could even be gotten with bellows if you want them. This is because that form of the instrument is still considered useful because of the articulation it allows to the musicians for their music. In the article, there seemed to be something rather naive about the way they were bandying about a few speakers here and there. Speakers are directional and it takes a good sound engineer to design the acoustics in a given auditorium and tune it even before the musicians show up. It takes sufficient drivers to move the air in the room without blowing peoples ears out. Speaker stacks for surround sound can be expensive and for a grand opera are not trivial and you are not talking yet about the amplifiers and generators and boards to control them and then the computer and programming to produce the sound. If you have been to a large music gathering you have probably noticed the huge speaker stacks that enable them to accelerate the air around you without hurting your ears. I would say the way of singing for Wagner is optimized for an acoustic presentation in a large venue. It is very taxing on the voice to sing that way and takes a lot of athletic ability on the part of the singer to sustain it without electronic amplification although they are usually assisted by the acoustics of the room. If you mike them, you are no longer doing opera and you will attract a different type of singer and your music will become a different species of musical experience. So the singer will have to decide what direction he would like to follow with his music and what sort of audience he wants to cater to. I would suggest that there is room for all of them in music.
I just got home from a art festival in Minneapolis. The Minnesota Orchestra teamed up with an artist to put on a light show that reacted to sounds present and turned a performance in to a live fantasia viewing. I've never seen anything like it. It was a perfect blend of music, art, and gesture. I walked out of that knowing I just saw the best show in my life. Modern music has adapted to technology for live performances classical needs to do the same. That could do so much to bring in younger generations.
Yeah - you could have switched the loudspeaker off...
Computers aren't musicians, they are merely instruments, and we've gotten to the point that for an awful lot of things, those instruments played (programmed) by actual people can produce quite good results.
In the case of a pit orchestra, this just means one player could cover an entire multi-instrument "book" with a single EWI/EVI and laptop rather than actually physically switching instruments, but it would do nothing to alter the actual number of people required. Each person could still only play one part at a time. Electronics such as vocal harmonizers can be used to get around this to a degree, but those can be used with ordinary acoustic instruments as well (as the fact that they are VOCAL harmonizers would tend to imply).
If you've got the budget and space for a two-piece horn section, but have the means to make it sound like a four or six-piece horn section, who is being harmed by doing so? The number of people who would be up there playing doesn't change in either case.
DISCLAIMER: There's an EWI sitting within arm's reach of me as I type this. I may have a vested interest in proving it worthy for certain applications that AREN'T supposed to sound synthy.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Hatsume Miku. This robot voice has more songs created by more people in history. Tripshots and supercell are some of the best examples.
The World is HERS.
Well, sort of a PM anyway. But I'm regarded by some as a pretty good guitarist, singer and (sometime) keyboardist in my spare time. Personally, I'm tired of MIDI-based musicians doing 1-singer karaoke with their laptop or iPad for 5 hours at a time in local bars because they are cheap to hire. It's boring and cold but it's pure economics. Congested, compressed electronic shit comes out of the tiny portable PA speakers at insufferable volume, yet there's no real energy or soul. No real groove in the old sense of the word. Drunk oldies think it's acceptable because they can recognize the tunes. Drunks are easy to please that way.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for every kind of experimentation in music making and there are musicians who can get it to sound good. But we've seen were automation leads in other spheres as well: it can easily lead to these mind-numbing deadness passed off as "music". A whole generation of new musicians seems to have taken up instruments never having heard an actual, old-fashioned ensemble group playing LIVE awesomely on traditional instruments. They don't know what "sit in the pocket" means, essential to getting that warm throb that underpins great live music.
You clearly have a good understanding of the situation, and I agree with you in the general case. Specifically, you mention augmentation of a horn section, and acknowledge it's a good tradeoff when faced with a limited budget. I couldn't agree more.
My comment was more directed at people who have said things like "Computers are better at producing music because there are no errors and it's always the same."
I don't think I could roll my eyes dramatically enough to address all that is wrong with such a statement.
On the topics of EWIs, I have Michael Brecker's "Don't Try This At Home" album featuring an EWI and I like it. Is yours the trumpet style (a la Jon Swana) or the sax/flute woodwind type? How good is the approximation of wind instrument sound these days?
...as the late Paul Harvey would say. You don't know it if you only read about this in the New York Times. Misrepresentation? Thy name is Hartford Wagner Festival. They lack disclosure of their fake orchestra where it counts most: on the homepage of their website and where money actually changes hands, which, given actual research on how most consumers read (that is to say, skim) websites, is a recipe for disaster. They mingled "sponsor links" with other "interesting links" in a way which made it impossible to tell which was which without personally contacting each one, giving them an unearned veneer of credibility. Some of those links have come down as it has been revealed that not only were those entities not sponsors, but they had no knowledge of HWF at all. They have misrepresented their fake orchestra on their Facebook page as the "Vienna Phil." Moreover, they misrepresent themselves as artistic martyrs when the outrageous ticket price and their own comments -- which were then scrubbed from the page, as they have a penchant for censorship -- indicate the cheapness and arrogance that really underlie this ill-conceived vanity project.
Yes, most of this went down on Facebook and not in any newspaper.
Free enterprise? Isn't free enterprise at least partly what got us the 2008 recession? If you could have killed that before it started, wouldn't you? Free enterprise may be better than a lot of alternatives, but it's amoral at best.
My comment was more directed at people who have said things like "Computers are better at producing music because there are no errors and it's always the same."
With a group of top-flight professional musicians, there are astonishingly few errors, and once they figure out what they want to do, the performances tend to close in on a repeatable target. The main advantages there are that (1) they can follow verbal instructions, or listen to something else and emulate it, and (2) they do a lot of thinking for themselves, when the composer is less than specific. Computers do neither of these things.
On the topics of EWIs, I have Michael Brecker's "Don't Try This At Home" album featuring an EWI and I like it. Is yours the trumpet style (a la Jon Swana) or the sax/flute woodwind type? How good is the approximation of wind instrument sound these days?
The trumpet style is called an EVI, the clarinet/soprano sax style is called an EWI. I have an EWI, though I've hacked it into a curved saxophone shape. Functionally it's exactly the same, it just puts the instrument and my hands in a more comfortable position. The EWI Brecker was using was rather primitive compared to what's available now, and the sounds are dependent on what you're willing to buy. It's totally disconnected from the hardware used to play in the MIDI data. I'm using "Mr. T Sax" (which has since been supplanted by "The Sax Brothers") and "The Trumpet", both by Sample Modeling, as my main instruments when I'm striving for critical realism.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I may be older than the bulk of the /. crowd, but some of my favorite music simply *cannot* be played by an orchestra. I remember when they had the same lame outcry against electronic instruments.http://www.hybridsme.com