| At 22:20 11/04/97 -0400, you wrote:
>It may be that i'm missing something. currently i am experimenting with
>setting levels of sine waves using GEN 10. just keeping it simple, but do
>understand that a bit of chorus or vibrato can be useful. trying to build
>my perception. is my impression of an advantage in the use of sones vs
>decibels somehow completely nullified at the moment a single overtone is
>added? or two? or seven? that fletcher-munson curve sure did scare the hell
>out of me.
Yes indeed, sones are only useful when using single tones. Once you start
playing more than one instrument at once complex psychoacoustic effects
come into play which - in my opinion - make 'loudness' impractically
difficult to quantify in any useful way.
Sones don't work very well when the music gets complex. (In fact they don't
seem to work very well with simple sines either. Hmm...)
>this is a question: is the above getting excessively skeptical for my
>purposes? the reason for my suspicion is that, ten years ago, i was
>surrounded by an ornery band of audio aficionado / technicians who insisted
>that quad audio was a waste of time in a concert hall because each member
>of the audience would not experience it in exactly the same manner.
Well, the difference is that quad - even ambisonics - was never really
supposed to guarantee a certain kind of experience. Even stereo doesn't do
that. As with everything, it depends on too many other variables, even
discounting subjective ones - user position, speakers, room response, and
probably temperature, humidity and altitude too. But that's not to say it's
a waste of time, because it works well enough most of the time to be useful
all the same.
Ok, you *might* be able to do something similar with loudness. But my
suspicion is that the subjective experience of loudness in an ensemble is
actually more complex than the experience of spatialisation, and a model
that works reliably will be too complex to be useful in practice.
It's possibly more of a long term research project - the kind of thing
someone might get a PhD for. If your goal is to do that kind of work then
it's a worthwhile undertaking. But if you're interested in elegant simple
ways to make music, I suspect it's something of a technical distraction.
>ask me this again in a few years. just using decibels now. currently on
>page 12 of five 1000 page books as i conduct my experiments. and i have a
>day job completely unrelated. my guess is that there is a healthy mix of
>subscribers present. just plain musicians, computer programmers, hardware
>developers, mathematicians and others with equally useful skills in this
>arena. and a few who have it all together.
>
>all of the above are capable of making art. as a just plain musician
>obsessed with the control and realization of musical visions, i find myself
>on a point on a path lacking a clear view of how i will make art with this
>thing sitting on my desk. pure chance of course is not my bag. maybe the
>automatism of the surrealists (chance/subconscious followed by control).
>but probably calculation of little things followed by chance/subconsious
>followed by control. and this brings us back to sines sones sines
>sones.
Ok, this is getting into subjective areas and aesthetics, but how about
approaching it this way - forget about the fine detail, and just play with
the different ugens to see what you can do with them. Better still, abuse
them and get them to do things they were never designed to do.
By the time you're done with experimenting with tables, the various
spectral techniques, FM, FOF, and all the rest, you'll have enough of a
compostional pallette to do some interesting things.
You'll also be in a position to see just how important subjective level is
- or isn't - in practice, and can then decide whether or not it's worth
looking into further.
For what it's worth I haven't found any of the books to be that useful from
an artistic/aesthetic point of view, unless I'm attempting to do very
specific things, e.g. modelling vowel formants, in which case I need to
know what the formant frequencies and amplitudes are.
There really doesn't seem to be much out there that concenrates on
*composing* with computers, in the same way that books on traditional
harmony and orchestration point you in the direction of what works and what
doesn't. The literature seems to be mostly about techniques, rather than
about how to use those techniques to do interesting things. But that's the
nature of the field, I suppose.
R.
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