stank@anvil.WV.TEK.COM (Stan Kalinowski) (03/17/90)
I'm a software engineer that has always been interested in creating
music but I haven't had sufficient motivation to actually learn an
instrument. I think I'm tone deaf too, I never could get the hang of
trumpet in grade school. Now, with MIDI technology, I can make a
computer play (in real time) things that I invent (not in real time).
I've had a chance to experiment with creating "music". My first
approach was to purposefully ignore all music theory on the grounds
that it might influence my thinking and then somehow spoil the
originality of my creative process. What I came up with is this:
fwtowero fjlskdfwrw fsposwa mbsafo fsdnpwerao
(I couldn't actually put the sounds in this message, my e-mailer
doesn't understand music. You'll just have to look at that string of
characters and relate it to speech as you know it, and then map that
relationship into the sound domain.)
The string above is actually just random garbage that I typed in and
then edited out the punctuation marks and other special characters.
Think of the removed characters as "bad" notes. Using this approach,
(which I have rather pompously named the "monkey/typewriter approach")
I came up with some things that, when looped and quantized into
regular bar patterns, were sometimes interesting to listen to. In my
opinion, of course. Having generated some of that "music", I had to
stop and ask myself, is it art? The resounding answer was "Hell if I
know, but it beats watching TV."
I've been following the thread of discussion about the pro's and con's
of formal music theory training with great interest. Although I tend
to lean towards the notion of totally rejecting music theory, I can
also see why it would be forced upon music students. When I was very
young, I was taken on school field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York. There I saw some abstract paintings and wondered
what differentiated those incomprehensible scribblings and smears from
the piece of plywood that my father cleaned his brushes on after
painting the house. Later in life, I saw a painting by Picasso that
was not abstract, it was a regular landscape. (If I remember
correctly. What it was isn't important, the fact that it was
realistic is.) I asked myself, "Why does a man who has obviously
mastered the skill of smearing paint on canvas and making it look like
something recognizable, wind up doing abstract art?" I chalked it up
to bad drugs and left it at that. Still later in my life, I decided
to learn a little about art history. I discovered that pictorial art
evolved rather slowly from realism to impressionism and finally
exploded into the abstract. I learned that up until the appearance
of abstract art, the relative merits of a painting were judged on the
basis of technique, the concept, and the expression as it related to
the established rules of painting. The creativity was in expressing
the concept given rules of whatever genre the artist was trained in
and the the limitations imposed by the medium. With the advent of
abstract art, the creativity was judged on either the sensual appeal
(form, color, texture, etc.) or on the nature of the concept itself.
So what's all this got to do with music? Whoops, better start a new
paragraph, this one's full. Ahhhhaahaahaahaa. Take that mister
Steinberg.
Music, like painting, has evolved slowly over time. It has reached
the abstract stage of development, but the older genres still exist.
In music as in painting, the emergence of each new genre did not
completely erase all that was set down by previous genres. In each
revolution, all that changed were the rules by which the artist was
judged. I feel we have achieved a sort of expressive utopia, artists
can now pick the medium and genre that they can best express
themselves in and let their imaginations soar. Each genre has its own
devotees and artists. If you don't like what's on the menu of genres,
create a new one. All you have to do to legitimize it, is inspire a
following. Man! And we thought the ancient greeks had it good. Of
course, in these days of compromise, the following (i.e. legitimacy)
is sometimes measured by how much money people spend on the medium.
At least that's the only reason I can give for the existence of TV.
Well, there now, I've said it and I'm glad. (hoo boy! that was corny)
I hope I at least inspire more discussion along the lines of music
theory vs. total freedom, it has been interesting.
stank
US Mail: Stan Kalinowski, Tektronix, Inc., Interactive Technologies Division
PO Box 1000, MS 61-028, Wilsonville OR 97070 Phone:(503)-685-2458
e-mail: {ucbvax,decvax,allegra,uw-beaver}!tektronix!orca!stank
or stank@orca.WV.TEK.COM