Thanks for your thoughts.

I share your feeling of bewilderment at an embarrassment of riches, a wilderness of possibilities.

I propose that sound art has not (yet) been completely theorized. Composition in notation for pitch and time came about through a long, drawn-out process of making music, notating it, and teaching composition that crystallized into a body of practice that could be theorized. This process took between one and two hundred years just to get solidly started. Along the way, countless possibilities for making music in pitch and time were, literally, ruled out. At the same time, fruitful possibilities were brought sharply into focus and, indeed, formalized as the language of tonality. Despite rhetoric to the contrary the evolution of tonality never stopped, though I certainly agree that it encountered severe obstacles. In fact, the evolution of tonality is still going on.

Musique concrete, acousmatic music, and spectromorphology are essays in the formalization or theorization of sound art. These meta-styles have not captured the bourgeoisie (a most desirable outcome) as tonality has. 

In my view, such theorization, and such a meta-style or styles, will happen. I believe that a critical notion is that of 'generator.' In tonality, modulation is a generator of form. Similarly, in counterpoint, imitation is a generator of form. Of course, this is far too simple, but I think my point is clear enough. I hope those more versed in the theory of sound art than I am will suggest what are, or could be, generators of form in sound (as opposed to tonality or counterpoint).

The body of practice is certainly building up. The practitioners include not only EA artists but also film composers and game composers. Well, perhaps it is beginning to capture the bourgeoisie after all.

Regards,
Mike
----- Original Message ----- 
From: peiman khosravi 
To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk 
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 8:04 PM
Subject: [Csnd] Re: Re: RE: Re: about the synthesis on an excellent sound found in freesound.


As Risset mentions in this article:  


http://www.utexas.edu/cola/france-ut/archives/risset_2.pdf  


his lack of interest with pure tape music came from the limitations imposed by the technology. It's a different way of working, an empirical approach to sound design (as developed at the GRM): tweak the control parameters that the technology offers to produce the desired sound. And Risset of course was more interested in having the same a priori control over sonic detail that one has over instrumental writing in instrumental music (it's a question of what the French call Ecriture: I remember Tristan Mureil saying something like, I paraphrase,  "music concrete lacked form because it disregarded ecriture all together"). That's why Risset wanted to work with pure synthesis so that he could sculpt more complex sounds in the same way that an instrumental composer could control the parameters (that were note-orientated and thus far more limited in terms of sonic properties). Of course the answer is somewhere else: we need to rid ourselves to certain extend from the morality of musical composition that's in the blood, it's not about parameters anymore but about continuum. Our sonic models are now more complex and resist being broken into desecrate parameters.   


Risset also mentions that today's computers allow detail control over recorded samples in a way that was never available with analogue tape machines (you can change pitch independently of speed for example). This comes across mainly through numerous analysis/resynthesis methods available, hence my interest in spectral manipulation, which really is synthesis more that transformation. So I don't see the difference between using pure synthesis or recorded samples with today's technology. In fact it has been demonstrated to me that some composers of earlier tape-music at GRM were also using the technology to do additive and subtractive synthesis (with ear) but using recorded sounds as their starting point (with basic filtering, transposing and mixing all this is possible).  


So the gap between imagination and technology is closing, the question is what do we do with the technology? Why every morning I wake up feeling: what sound am I going to create now? How am I going to proceed? What is my dream sound world? It's a bless and a problem at the same time. It's like we are now offered a blank paper to write on in the same way that Bach had, but I for one feel that I lack the experience to capture anything on this new form of blankness. But then it's all a journey of discovery, otherwise where is the fun in it?


Best
Peiman








On 11 Jul 2008, at 18:39, Tobiah wrote:




 > Using only pitch change, mixing and reverb, the author
 > of the sound that you linked to has created something
 > that would take much artistry and effort to create using
 > regular opcodes.
*all* the matter is to synthesize this sound from nothing, with whatever opcodes are needed. As a user of csound, i'm interested mainly in synthesis, and that was the motive i sent the message.


I understand the purist stance, but I finally agree with a
synthesis Guru that I studied with in the early nineties who even then had the foresight to describe mathematical synthesis to be 'passe', pointing toward capture and manipulation
as the new frontier; computers had just risen to that
level of capability.  I thought that he was a fool at
the time, my head filled with FM synthesis algorithms,
and with a passion for the ultimate in freedom from constraints that comes with opcode synthesis.  It may be
the same reluctance that had so many studios clinging
to mag-tape as their primary capture medium.


For academic purposes, adding sinewaves together is loads of fun, and I understand your interest in making a synth
sound similar to your example sound.  The example though, probably
took the author 15 minutes to create, demonstrating that
capture and manipulation is the most efficient method to date, and in my experience, no matter the effort and complexity of the algorithm, capable of producing far more alluring and believable textures.


You can still take advantage of all of the old techniques;
you can FM a source sound, or mod a sine with a source sound..
or what you like.  
I know that this all sounds very one sided and opinionated,
but my message is that one is not failing to use csound
to its greatest potential because of the liberal use of
real world source sounds.  I'll stop short of saying that
the lack of their use would mean the opposite.






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