-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Locarnini 
To: Grant Covell ; Csound mailing list

Date: 29 April 1998 17:06
Subject: Re:Detailed parameters/ Overwhelming complexity


>
>--
>
>>But then there's the age old question: "But how does it sound?"
>>
>
>The problem is that most on this list are hardcore programmers and math
>whizs.  I usually have to get out a programmers dictionary to decipher the
>obscure techno-babble of most of the letters that come across.  I'm not
>complaining, I signed up for this.  Many are lured into Csound by the
claims
>that you can do anything with audio, all forms of synthesis etc.  What
isn't
>said is that you also need 4+ years of college level math, and be fluent in
>several computor languages to do anything RESEMBLING music.

No! You just need to work at it!
Personally I find the programing community overtly helpful to
non-programmers like myself, it's that sense of team spirit which I like
about the electro-acoustic music community.

>Thats why you
>don't see many musicians who think in terms of emotion, visions, fellings
>etc.  say they used Csound to compose their latest work.  If you had a
>vision that was powerfull and you wanted to capture it,  it would surely be
>lost by the time you wrestle with the latest trigonomic equation to pan
your
>sound etc.

Writing serious music is usually 5% inspiration 95% perspiration - do you
suppose Beethoven just 'felt' his music, and as if by magic it appeared on
the manuscript paper!?
Have you ever tried writing orchestral music? For me it takes much longer to
get from idea to realisation with instrumental music than when using Csound
(when I don't have to copy out 200 pages of parts!) (...Sorry people, I
haven't bought Finale/laser printer yet - I'm still in the dark ages, I
know!)

>You cannot compute emotions.  Emotion is a human experience, it
>cannot and will not ever be engineered in software.   Thus you cannot
>engineer music.  When you do it will sound machine-like which much of
>computor music does.

for example .... which pieces are you talking about...?
Have you ever heard Xenakis' La Legende d'Eer in which he uses maths to
directly address the physicality of the ear quote: "I have used probability
functions to generate the pressure-time curves: that is, I worked directly
with the 1/40,000 of a second"? It's brutal, visceral, and overpoweringly
expressive of human emotion!

>end of rant
>

end of response ..

JamieB