The subject I'm trying to study is related with music and emotion. What do you feel like when you listening to music but you can't tell which instrument is playing because it simply doesn't exists?
It couldn't just be a combination between two instruments that you feel that you could recognize separately. What I'm talking about is when you feel that you can't reach a visual image about what you're hearing. It's like a "Señor Coconut effect". The listener doesn't know if there's a big orchestra playing and some guys over there shouting "Mambo!" or if it's nothing more than just a guy in front of the computer. How many instruments do you hear in this recording? How many players? What kind of instruments are they?
The most astonishing subject is that people like Uwe Schmidt make albums like "El baile alemán", where the computer does everything with the help of just a few samples, but when you here Señor Coconut playing live you see a computer but lots of musicians with their "classic instruments" too. That's as disturbing as a Farinelli. It gets confusing and maybe most of the listeners will tend to think that the album is made with "real" instruments too. What's a real instrument today?
Maybe a computer playing "real timbres" is less confusing than a two real instruments playing a unisone and creating a new timbre?
Anyway, my thesis is that synthesized sounds can be music expression vehicles. Today we can hear more and more timbres and we see all kind of strange things even in contemporary popular music. For example, an electric guitar can play as if it was a piano (King Crimson). Musicians and music producers play and express theirselves in a genuine emotionally way by using artificially sinthesized timbres. It's not about two or more instruments playing a unisone and creating a new timbre, but about developing new timbres in musical acts. The result is that music is less "seen" than yesterday.
The history has lots of things to say to us about this. I'm interested in an experimental approach and i would like to write about what different artists do and why do they do it like that. I'm also interested in the "castratti" voices, in some church choirs that play are hidden so that you can't see them in churches, synagoges and operas and in Mahler's sixth symphony, where a bell is being played from outside the scenario so that you can't see where it comes from.
What can we say about recorded music in this investigation? We record music since XXth century. This makes possible to reproduce always a same version. Recording and playing distort the sounds, giving us new musical experiences. Some of them are the vinyl sound, the scratched cd sound and the bad quality mp3 sound. All of them are used today as musical tools for making new music. Not only Uwe Schmidt, but also some of the 80's music, most of the recent film and tv soundtracks and pop music is made using midi orchestras or keyboards that emulate a "real sound". Virtual timbres have helped to some musical styles developement, such as the casiotone MT-40 in 1985, who give birth to the "digital reggae". The latinamerican cumbia and reggaetón styles need some use of the synthed percussion, bass, brass and strings in order to reach a particular sound.
Adorno said that art is not the same now that we live in a technical reproductibility era. I would like to add that according to music, some time ago the timbre could be seen, but nowadays it's not that easy.
There is a sound in my head that hasn't got any image nor face.
Which methods should I use to demonstrate this ideas?
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