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Jack of all Trades or ONE TRICK PONY???
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dewdrop_world



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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 4:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Kassen wrote:
EDIT. I just realise this probably won't compile. If you want to spork the nymphette you probably need to remove the "int" part and change her into a air-head using "void" instead of "int". It's probably unsuitable to go into why that is so here and now ;¬)


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061502071.html

Naomi Wolf wrote:
Periods of tremendous positive growth in women's roles and opportunities always generate a counter-reaction that comes in the form of images...

The 1920s were a precursor of our own time. In an era in which women had just been granted the right to vote and were moving forward with great seriousness -- forming groups to stop lynching, building settlement houses and cleaning up Washington -- the popular press was full of Paris Hiltons. News accounts reveled in drunken debutantes frolicking in fountains, cocaine-addled Hollywood starlets dead in perverse circumstances, and the ubiquitous flapper, who was devoted to pleasure and had not a serious thought in her marcelled head.

What value is there in such countervailing images -- the shadow to women's increasingly bright reality? The first is psychological. On some deep level, there's a generalized feeling that women's vulnerability equals the guarantee of receiving a reliable supply of their love and care. There's an anxiety that if women become too strong, too independent, we won't be able to count on them to nurture and they won't need love. Because men, children and (not to put too fine a point upon it) the whole edifice of human civilization depend on women's willingness to nurture, it's scary to take a step into the unknown -- to see if women will continue to love if they're really free to choose whether to do so. (We will, of course, but it will take a generation or so of proof for everyone to calm down about it.)


Oops... off topic Razz

James

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 5:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Yes, I felt bad about that but I realy don't think we're allowed to spork her otherwise. I'd like to blame Ge here, but in general I have to say that it's quite hard to conjure nymphettes in a non-sexist way, regardless of syntax.

I tried! In my defence I *did* sugest yielding which is good practice after sporking anyway.

Maybe you could try some JITC (just in time conjuring) in SC and if that doesn't work satisfactory I fear Stanley will need to pour over some tomes himself for suitable spells.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 5:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

kkissinger wrote:

...
I wish to thank everyone involved with this thread. All the comments have provided good reading and insight. Currently, I am in the throes of composing some new music -- the work is going slowly and in reading this thread it revealed to me that I snagged myself in the "trap" of wanting to create music that "really pushes the envelope!". To read your posts, and share a few comments is thought-provoking and forces issues to the surface.

So, I think I'll just set out to compose stuff, avoid worrying about it's originality, and have faith that the results will be artistically satisfying.


I have a similar problem. I too sometimes wish I would/could write music that pushes the envelope. But I compose to fill emotional needs and cannot get beyond that. So why would I want to push the envelope? I guess it's the pervading sense within our culture that art that does not push the envelope is not original.

Now, I do think art should be original. There is little art and even less satisfaction in simply rehashing old territory. The tricky part is determining the existing boundaries of musics' many territories and what actually constitutes originality.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 6:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

dewdrop_world wrote:

...
Of course, other cultures (like the Aka Pygmies in Central Africa) solve the problem by treating music as a collective, ritual effort rather than a solitary, self-aggrandizing one.James


Is it just me or does that have the smell of a false dichotomy? scratch

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 6:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

dewdrop_world wrote:


Naomi Wolf wrote:
Periods of tremendous positive growth in women's roles and opportunities always generate a counter-reaction that comes in the form of images...


James


Ha! Let's not miss old man stereotypes while we're at it! As a 50-something who was sacked after 27.5 creative years from a research lab-turned-shithole, by MBAs who have as much aptitude for running a company as Bush & Co. have for running a country, and who has now experienced the realities of age discrimination in job hunting, this old wizard still has enough spark left in him to toss some lightening from the tower when provoked.

Nevertheless . . .

Stanley Pain wrote:

if you are serious about creativity and your audience, at some point you have to say "enough is enough" with the technology, forget the cerebral and give it some visceral Wink


This is precisely the alpha versus beta brainwave tradeoff. "Use the Force, Luke." I don't remember old Obi-Wan imprisoning a nymphette in his cave.

My personal escape hatch for the tendency towards technical perfection is making folk music. The topic of electro-as-the-new-folk-music has come up at discussions at electro-music 2006 in Cheltenham and elsewhere. If everybody got in the practice of making some music every day instead of watching TV, perhaps most of it wouldn't be art, but it sure would tend to raise the level of musical consciousness.

Another example that comes to mind is Charlie Parker, who used to show up at gigs without his sax because he had pawned it for drug money. Reportedly at least once he picked up a plastic instrument and proceeded to blow some of the most amazing music the audience had ever heard.

Not being Charlie Parker (I'd be dead by this age), I think the suggestion to delve into ChucK and LiSa is a good one, meanwhile using Live or whatever to keep the alpha spark glowing. This is really how we used to develop DSP telephony apps in the good old days of Bell Labs, by the way: use graphical signal flow environments to prototype system level structures (read: composition), and rewrite and verify in more effective real time languages (usually DSP assembler) for module deployment (read: performance). It's like UML-to-code in other software systems; some code automated (mostly glue & boilerplate), some hand coded. Unfortunately, music creation software doesn't have as much economic force behind it, but it can learn some lessons by considering those spaces.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 7:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Acoustic Interloper wrote:

Ha! Let's not miss old man stereotypes while we're at it!


Yea it sucks big time. But it could be worse, one could be stuck with those old woman stereotypes.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Stanley Pain wrote:


i believe the ability to programme shows a dedication to your art, and to be honest, some artists are less than 100% dedicated...

i believe it shows a certain work ethic.


OR how anally retentive one can be?

Work ethic? I don't think so myself. Are you saying that if you can't program, that your music is unworthy of listening to? Personally I think the majority of the most soul-less, non-emotional music out there is over programmed and/ or engineered. Yes there are 'masters' out there, but they are of a minority (but perhaps that's what you are trying to say Stanley?, but I wouldn't blame that on dedication).

I remember having to sit through an entire LP by monolake at a friend's dinner party recently. It was the most soul-less bland wallpaper paap I'd heard in ages. I was so hungry for some emotion or something to raise its anal blip-bloppy self trapping nil-sound out of itself, yet this guy always seems to get rave reviews both in places like mags and the net. Fortunately I did remark on how wondrous I thought my host's taste in music was. I was then pleasantly surprised on how much he actually agreed with me! How many times have I also read a review in Wire magazine, only to be utterly disappointed after actually hearing it. Too many people are wrongly led by what others write. I mean there are actually courses available in London that teach you how to appreciate music. What the f**k is going on there??? Shocked

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 10:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

dewdrop_world wrote:

For me, the point of programming is to create not a fixed piece, but free me from considering every musical detail during performance so I can concentrate on directing the overall form. I don't want loops but in a live context you just can't control everything. The "play" is in making note choices and screwing around with timbres; the work is in organizing semi-automated processes to produce non-repeating details while leaving me to control higher-level parameters.


I should also have said, another element of "play" (alpha-activity) is in interacting with the happy accidents that come from the code. Most of my pieces now involve some material played into a mic on a live instrument, or on a midi keyboard... which of course I have to improvise because I never know exactly what the computer is going to do.

James

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 10:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

dewdrop_world wrote:

I should also have said, another element of "play" (alpha-activity) is in interacting with the happy accidents that come from the code. Most of my pieces now involve some material played into a mic on a live instrument, or on a midi keyboard... which of course I have to improvise because I never know exactly what the computer is going to do.
James


Yeah, interacting with reactions coming out of one's code can be a lot more alpha-interesting than interacting with the static code. You might be interested in this paper ( http://home.ptd.net/~dparson/dafx06_dparson_final.pdf ) from dafx06 or the electro-music 2006 presentation that preceded it ( http://home.ptd.net/~dparson/elmu06talk.pdf ), or even better the somehwat speculative draft ( http://home.ptd.net/~dparson/icmc06_dparson.pdf ). A quote from the latter:

"Instead of using fixed meter, tonal
progressions, scales, chords, pedal points and melody notes
as the basis for composition, this method extracts and stores
digital superpositions of these musical structures from MIDI
performance data. Subsequent performance, which
invariably includes nondeterministic contributions from
performers, instruments and performance environments,
triggers alternative bindings for superpositional musical
structures that result in novel computer-collaborative
accompaniment. This approach unifies composition and
improvisation."

There has been academic study of matching of probabilistic 'scores' to performance data -- I'm about 1/2 way thru David Temperley's *Music and Probability* since starting it in January -- but most of these impotent old wizard in a tower studies are aimed to controlled applications like score matching. Haven't read much on using it in live performance/improv situations, although it may be that, unlike the impotent wizards, all the hot stud performers spend less time writing about it and more time doing it. Except on web forums, of course.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 11:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Looks interesting. I'm printing the 2 papers out to take with me to the beach this weekend Cool

hjh

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 12:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

v-un-v wrote:

Work ethic? I don't think so myself. Are you saying that if you can't program, that your music is unworthy of listening to?


of course not! i just think that with tech-orientated music, it's an easy indicator (not THE indicator) in a profit driven and fast moving industry.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 12:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Kassen wrote:
Yes, I felt bad about that but I realy don't think we're allowed to spork her otherwise. I'd like to blame Ge here, but in general I have to say that it's quite hard to conjure nymphettes in a non-sexist way, regardless of syntax.

I tried! In my defence I *did* sugest yielding which is good practice after sporking anyway.

Maybe you could try some JITC (just in time conjuring) in SC and if that doesn't work satisfactory I fear Stanley will need to pour over some tomes himself for suitable spells.


i've been dying to use this pic for ages, and although not directly relevant and perhaps a little OT i couldn't halp myself.

Posted Image, might have been reduced in size. Click Image to view fullscreen.

yeah... maybe...

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Kassen wrote:

Code:
//define a fun-loving and intelligent nymphette
fun int nymphette()
    {
    //secret runes go here
    }

//didn't forget what I wanted to do with her at all!
spork ~ nymphette();

//give nymphette a chance to do something back
me.yield();



Best code I've read in years... Laughing Back in the 70s I would read over the source code for Berkeley Unix and Bill Joy would put in funny comments and a lot of poetry. That stuff never made it into Linux, AFAIK.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 3:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Thanks. I like jokes like that. I tried to run this;

while ( !machine.crash() ) <<<"chuck is bug free!">>>;

but it doesn't work because machine.crash() doesn't return anything (which kinda makes sense becuase it actually crashes the VM and nothing after that will run).

Fortunately this will run, I like this;

while ( float rubber_ducky )
{
//some loop that makes a beeping sound
}

Not showing off my "leet ChucK skilllz", I mean to say that if I'm writing my own instruments it's important to me that they are beautifull, or at least as beautifull as I can make them. To me this realy relates to this topic; while programing I'm (ideally) defining how I think about that side of music (the side the instrument covers) and I'll refine the instrument while refining my thoughts. this is definately a creative thing, for me. I'm also finding that if the code properly reflects my thoughts new ideas coherent with those ideas will be very straightforward to implement, halfbaked-ones "won't fit" so it helps me look.

But that's just how it works for me :¬).

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 3:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

one I have used for a number of years:


#define bush_is_an_idiot true
...
...
...
while( bush_is_an_idiot)
{

...break condition
}

Yea, yea, I'm so old I still use #defines Rolling Eyes

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 3:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Stanley Pain wrote:

yeah... maybe...


It's a excelent pic. I skirted on the fringe of Role Playing groups that would be like that for a few years, definatley a lot of truth there.

Still, I'm finding a lot of expresiveness in coding at -what seems to me like- a lot less efford then what Pratched was hinting at and at times had the chance to share that feeling with larger or smaller audiences. I'm also doing fine in the nymphette department :¬).

I think you can do a lot better then just a vague "hope" in this field.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 3:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Bachus, ChucK uses "untill" as a sort of negative "while". It's just syntactic sugar but to me this makes a lot of sense;

int the_end;

untill (the_end)
(
//loop
}

Very readable and intuitive and if you have a couple of those in paralel you can make all of them drop out of the loop in one fell swoop by writing

1 => the_end;

Which is also very straightforward and readable.

Not funny as such, not at all political but I like it a lot better then while(true) when it comes down to readable code that tries to limit the number of mental jumps needed in understanding it.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 4:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

There is an old cliché, "Jack of all trades, master of none." Of course, a jack of all trades is also a renaissance man. On the other hand, a one trick pony might also be called a master.
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 4:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Kassen wrote:
Bachus, ChucK uses "untill" as a sort of negative "while". It's just syntactic sugar but to me this makes a lot of sense;
...


I agree and have missed an
unil(condition) {body},

for

do {body} until(condition)
is not always what one needs

Then again if one were writing in Common Lisp one could create one's own syntax as needed. That, of course, raises readability problems.

And so it goes.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 6:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

LOL

if only capture a young nymphette was that easy..

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 4:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

bachus wrote:

Then again if one were writing in Common Lisp one could create one's own syntax as needed. That, of course, raises readability problems.

And so it goes.


Yes, you can, very easly, create a functional yet utterly unreadable mess that way but if applied well it can also look quite sensible and to some degree obvious.

I don't think that's realy that different from object oriented strategies. For some things that works very well and if it does it'll be very readable and expressive but there are plenty of examples whre it just creates a huge mess.

I've come to believe that programing for electronic music has some unique challenges in that in electronic music there is no consensus on topics like what a "note" is or where a "instrument" ends, which creates problems because a formal language is going to need a exact definition. We've talked about those topics in this section a few times.... If you have clear ideas on the answers to those questions for your own (possibly temporary) setup then those should lead to reable code and at that point I think the danger of losing a lot of time and forgetting what you were after in the first place are nearly non-existant.

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 5:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Acoustic Interloper wrote:

...
"...digital superpositions of these musical structures from MIDI
performance data."


Since you quoted it could I cheat and just ask if the semantic content of superposition in this context comports with:

"A metaphor for superposition may be envisioned as how the Joker acts as a wild card in many card games and may be perceived as a superposition of all the cards of the deck. In the way that the The Fool is the superposition of all the cards of the Tarot. Or how the 109th bead on a Japa mala, often referred to as the sumeru, bindu, stupa, or guru bead is the superposition of the 108 bead stations of the garland train."

I.e. are we talking about an abstraction that "generates" the structures or a compilation and linkage of a (possibly open) set of concrete instances of structures.
Confused

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 7:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

bachus wrote:

I.e. are we talking about an abstraction that "generates" the structures or a compilation and linkage of a (possibly open) set of concrete instances of structures.
Confused


Both, actually, and having read some other papers on automated accompaniment and exchanged emails with their authors after I wrote that, I'd say this is the answer for all those systems, although of course the representation architectures differ.

All of these improv programs have some flavor of:

input stream --> pattern match --> output stream

Actually the score identifiers do too, it's just that the score stream isn't real time (usually), and the output consists mainly of idenitification.

Anyway, the pattern match is where the superposition takes place. Regardless of whether the program represents probabilities explicitly or not (mine doesn't), the pattern matching basically throws away detail when deciding that any given input parameter matches value A with some probability, value B with some probability, and so on. There are parameters at various levels of representation, e.g., MIDI pitch matched from a guitar audio signal, scales from a sequence of notes, chord from a set of notes, meter and tempo from a sequence of attacks and accents across time, place in a composition from the history and current state of incoming input, etc.

The pattern matching algorithm, its persistent data (e.g., chord patterns), state, and incoming stream represent a superposition because there is > 1 way to match the current performance, and some aspects of the match will always differ from performance to performance depending on state of the instrument and performers, effect of accompanists, decisions to improvise, and just normal variations in how one plays. The pattern matcher achieves superposition on input by throwing away incoming details, after which there are more than 1 possible input streams that could have led to this state. Infinite number, really.

Suppose I play my queens ambiguously in this hand, e.g., leave out some thirds. Now I have a superposition of major and minor thirds. My queens have become jokers. I think of this as freeze drying the input stream, i.e., throwing out water or some other aspect.

The output side consists of rehydrating the freeze dried data, although perhaps not with water. Switching metaphors, maybe the output generator substitutes a fourth for the missing third to give a suspended chord, turns the incoming queen->joker into joker->jack on the output. What triggers this re-interpretation of the joker is surrounding context in the stream, state, and persistent data. At this point the superposition collapses out into real notes.

Many programs keep some abstracted (superpositional) representation of the score as persistent data off to the side of the pattern matcher, to try to match input stream to score, giving some ability to predict where input appears to be headed. I capture scores by playing and capturing / merging traces of the output of preceding stages of the pattern matcher. The academic architecures are more precise (anal?) about correct matches and quantitative results for papers. I just want interesting accompaniment.

My plan was to use the genetic algorithm to generate alternative back end generator modules, from which I'd select a generator appropriate to a piece, but I found that much of the generator search space is dead boring, and that I can converge on a usable generator more rapidly by writing it by hand. Generators rehydrate the results of all pattern matching on input back into MIDI note streams, and a generator has parameters/code to decide at play time what rhythm/melody/harmony/voice deltas to use in rehydration, so there is room for surprises. They are not always good. Right now I am debugging a bassist who starts off hot but runs out of ideas before the end of the piece. I have a couple ideas what's wrong, but not enough time to work on it. Messing around with it a little last night, after a whole day of job coding and debugging.

In principle one could create a simplified pattern language for the front end match rules and the back end generate rules. ChucK would perhaps be a good framework for that, although Common LISP Shocked or Python is probably better for crafting special little pattern languages. These rules include the superpositions of values for some parameters, literally as wildcards. Shocked If the performance intensive pattern matching algorithms were then modularized and put beneath a C++ API that most users needn't cross, things could become interesting. The same general approach could apply to timbre (e.g., what parameters to apply to a grain delay unit generator), although I haven't tried applying this to timbre.

Anyway, I named it MIDIME because I knew I wouldn't have time in the foreseeable future to do any of those wonderful architectural enhancements, so I wrote something for me to experiment with, having no deadlines, customers, etc. Too much that already. But, the concepts are there, maybe somebody wants to do a CS real-time pattern matching Ph.D. applied to music. I'm too busy trying to figure out what to do about this nymphette here Question

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Acoustic Interloper



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PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 7:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Oh yeah, PS (as if that wasn't long enough), the nymphette reminded me it would be really interesting if the pattern matcher was a quantum computer, because then the state of the match would literally be all simultaneous possible accompaniments that you might hear in multiple sporking universes in which the piece is being performed, collapsing back to fewer than infinite universes on decoherence, and perhaps sporking persistent alternate universes for sets of really good performances.
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bachus



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PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 7:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Acoustic Interloper wrote:
if the pattern matcher was a quantum computer, because then the state of the match would literally be all simultaneous possible accompaniments that you might hear in multiple sporking universes in which the piece is being performed, collapsing back to fewer than infinite universes on decoherence, and perhaps sporking persistent alternate universes for sets of really good performances.


It's not clear to me that it would require a QC. Perhaps you'd only need find the appropriate integral form of the (Hilbert Space) superposition* vector? And If there was no such integral form of the vector it's not clear to me that QC could do the computation anyway. But then none of this is clear to me Rolling Eyes

The superposition of state vectors is itself a state vector is it not?

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