thinking about music in the future

The best questions are those who doesn't have a direct answer. For example, how can we see music? What do we see in music? How can we categorize such a complex timbre polyphony when we listen to music? How do we know which instruments are being played if we don't see them? Why do we feel so excited when we hear an instrument that we like? "That's a clarinet for sure!"
These questions have no answer yet, but they invite me to imagine how things will be in music.
In a near future, the computer will tell us which instruments are being played in the music we hear. The names will be, for example, "electric guitar with phaser" or "theremin with frequency filter". If the computer doesn't know the name of any given instrument, we will still be able to "handle it" because the computer will synthesize it for us in order to "rip it" from a song and play with it. But not just like a sample source. Let's say we hear a synthesized sound which suffers transformations during the whole song. First we hear distorsions, later phase changes, then flangers, and so on. We will be able to play with that sound and with all the variables which were handled in order to make that piece of music. The computer will build for us an easy to use environment that will let us control the sounds we hear. It will also be possible to change the song and make an intervention. The guitar solo of a song will now be my solo, as in karaoke.

a possible future

When my parents were kids we just had a few developments on timbre. Therefore, it wasn't difficult to recognize new sounds: that's a farfisa, this is a hammond organ, here we have a moog.
But now things get really difficult. You can get in love with a synthed sound that you hear in a record but you may know nothing about the source. How can you recreate that sound? I think that, in a near future, we will be able to recognize any sound we hear with the aid of computers. There will be some kind of timbre catalogue, like a palette. The analysis of polyphonic timbres will be revealing and inspiring. I hope I can see those changes.

electronic music, sound sources, performance

Uwe Schmidt, one of the most interesting musicians of our time, stated a few years ago that when electronic music was born, both the sound and its source were identical (1). However, things started to change with time. Surprisingly enough, digitally sampled hard disk music can sound totally organic even with a totally electronic sound source.

From the Musique Concrète in France and the group of Die Reihe in Germany, leaded by Eimert and Stockhausen, to the vast group of electronic musicians who are seriously interested in sampling techniques, we can realize that there was an interesting change. Nowadays, we cannot be absolutely sure about the real source of sounds. Maybe your favourite guitar solo was never played by a guitar player, and it is all about a carefully sampled guitar and a computer.

The big change comes when we think about music perception. When we listen to music, all these aspects are present, in an effort to organize our musical experience. The study of the particular way in which we interact with electronic music and its experience is exciting. We are aware of a whole new world in terms of performance coming to our musical universe.


(1) Estela, Paulino: File Managers - Mutek 05

Bach's music is revealing. While listening to the Musical Offering I can say that his music allows me to travel around different places, which are not only filled with enjoyment but also with desire. That's the magic that Bach gives to us: it is absolutely great, but it makes you want to create something on your own.
Thus, a masterpiece can be described as a marvelous but humble work. The best thing to listen, but still a great path to new works. Maybe beauty is always present when something is great but also tells you that nothing is totally achieved. Desire can breath in such a work.

Bach was probably interested in new sounds. It is impossible to deny that he was a sort of designer. He was an architect of harmony, as in his famous canon a 2 per tonos (Musical Offering), which delighted Douglas Hofstadter. Bach was an architecht who would probably have loved the new timbres that we can use today with a simple computer. Wendy Carlos did a great job by giving Bach a moog to tell us the same wonderful story. Most of the works that Bach made are stories which contain a personal and unique sense to each listener and each performer.

timbre, sampling and visuals

Musical timbre was arguably one of the most developed features during the last century. The study of musical timbre has led to a new understanding of human perception.
On a recent study, Bailes (2006) has studied the role of timbre in musical imagery. In the pilot experiment, music students had to do timbre discrimination tasks by hearing a melody in which each note was played by a different set of sampled orchestral instruments. However, nine of the respondents later said that the use of sampled sounds was a disadvantage for them in order to answer correctly. As Bailes states, "the recognition and identification of the stimulus sounds were particularly important for three participants who explained that they would tend to visualise an instrument or instrumentalist when imaging a timbre".
This suggests that the use of sampled sounds can tend to vanish the image of someone or something being played. This is particularly interesting, as the use of samples is a very popular technique among musicians nowadays. It may be possible that some musical styles which use samples frequently produce to listeners the feeling that the artist and/or the instrument is absent. Therefore, some people consider that visual external stimuli, such as the use of lights and video performances may serve as a perceptual substitute.
Sampling somehow exists since 1948, when composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer performed his works on tape manipulation.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schaeffer
Bailes, Freya: "Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music", 2006.

musical timbre as an adaptive feature? Timbre and image building.

1.Why is musical timbre so well developed? Is it an evolutionary adaptation? Following David Huron's work, are we able to say that timbre recognition development could be an advantage for humans? Maybe it is possible to build a timbre history. What we today call timbre recognition was arguably one of the most important safety measures that primitive humans had during the night. Timbre perception was highly developed in order to recognize potencially dangerous animals that they could not see in the dark. Humans were actually able to imitate these dangerous sounds with their pitch and timbral scales. Sound imitation was used to communicate which timbres should people be aware of.
Probably the first musical instruments that were studied by humans were animals. Humans may have needed to organize the timbral, rhythmical and pitch related features of dangerous animals. Grunts, growls and steps were analyzed in order to build a functional image of the animal that could let them decide whether to escape or fight against the animal.
Now we are able to go back again to Huron's work on music and social bond theory. It is also possible to study the interaction between mother and child during development, where music and movement are heavily related. Temporal arts could be the result of these development. In my opinion, art could have been useless itself, but an unconscious preparation for survival may have been developed.
It may be useful to make a blend between musical studies and psychoacoustic studies in order to study these topics in detail.