> Software synthesis has the promise of providing far more powerful,
> incredibly flexible synthesis methods. In theory, user
> interfaces for soft
> synthesis have more opportunities for innovation: excellent displays,
> generalized mapping networks, "Global Editing", Timbre Spaces, Neural
> Network training algorithms - you name it!
>
> Databases of sounds with descriptive categories, indexing sounds
> and timbres
> by example; research is going on in all of these areas.
Michael Gogins' Silence, which incorporates Gabriel Maldonado's Direct
CSound for Windows, is perhaps the best embodiment of this principle that
I've seen, at least in the domain of free software. See
http://www.pipeline.com/~gogins/Silence/Silence.htm for more details. I
started fooling with this about a year ago, but abandoned it because the
Java tools took up too much space on my hard drive, which is only :-) 6 GB.
Now that he has much of it working with Linux, I may revisit Silence. It
really is an impressive user interface, at least for mathematically or
algorithmically oriented composers, in which class I like to place myself.
> Of course, soft synthesis to date has been hobbled by "the complexity
> barrier" - that invisible wall that users and programmers hit, sometimes
> without understanding what they hit, which then halts their
> productivity. A
> whistle sometimes is the best instrument. There are no linker errors, no
> blue screens, low latency (except for nice understandable
> oscillation build
> ups), and no cables to hook up!
There are other factors to take note of:
1. Although there is a great deal of correlation between musical talent and
mathematical / programming talent, *the skill sets and required processes
for software engineering are markedly different from the skill sets and
required processes for composing and performing music*. While a computer can
help with the mechanics of composition -- getting notes onto paper,
experimenting with various sounds, etc. -- the disciplines are markedly
different. I'm a statistician / scientific application programmer / software
engineer for a living, and there is a *world* of difference between the
discipline of software engineering -- being religious about backups and
version control, requirements definition, quality and performance
assurance -- and the discipline of music -- hours of practicing, listening
to all kinds of other music, creating an *ensemble* from a group of
musicians, and touching human emotions with sound.
2. Those of us like myself who are extremely talented in the *technology*
run the risk of spending all their time on the technology, building tools
for composers rather than composing. At some point, you have to stop
downloading free software, spending hours de-fragging your hard drive,
collecting cheap and expensive synths, upgrading from Windows ME to Windows
2000 Professional, dreaming about what you could do with two 1 GHz Pentia
and the Linux 2.4 kernel and write some &%^$&$^ music! Here again, I admire
of Michael Gogins. He refuses to put a tool or a feature into Silence unless
he needs it for a purpose in his own composition.
3. Finally, while the world of *popular* music has warmly embraced analog
and digital electronic music, MIDI, synths, sequencers, samplers, and all of
our other fancy toys, the world of art / classical music for the most part
considers us somewhat lower on the evolutionary scale than, say, Elvis
Presley :-). The majority of composition in the classical world today -- at
least that which gets played by "New Music" ensembles -- features
conventional musical instruments and compositional styles that are *less*
shocking than, say, Stravinsky or Prokofiev were at the *end* of the 20th
century. Yeah, there's a few minimalists, a few microntonalists, a few
serialists, a few composers writing for non-standard instruments and a few
algorithmic composers, but they're not getting played. The "new
composers" -- Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, Edgar Meyer and Augusta Read
Thomas, for example -- write orchestral and chamber works that mix well on a
concert program with Haydn, Schubert, Bach or Shostakovich. They recoginize
that they're the "warm-up act" for Franz Joseph, Johann Sebastian or Dmitri
Dmitrievich :-). If a classical music aficionado can even *name* a living
American composer, odds are it will not be Barry Vercoe, Bill Alves, Pauline
Oliveros or even the fairly well-known Wendy Carlos.
> Soft synthesis will come of age when it finally becomes invisible; when
> musicians make music that could not have been made by a fixed hardware
> synthesizer, and nobody even mentions that it came from a software
> synthesizer. They just mention how good the music is.
That's what we all dream about :-). I've heard some (more or less) pure
electronic pieces that come close -- Wendy Carlos' "Sonic Seasonings",
Laurie Spiegel's computer compositions, and some of my favorite works from
the musique concrete era, like Henri Pousseur's "Trois Visages Liege" and
Charles Dodge's "Earth's Magnetic Field".
-- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, Chief Scientist, Borasky Research http://www.borasky-research.com http://www.aracnet.com/~znmeb mailto:znmeb@borasky-research.com mailto:znmeb@aracnet.com"There's no fuel like an old fuel" -- the National Coal Institute
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