Digital Music as CGI

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
mvuent said:
other than "motion capture" (like eshun described) i think part of the appeal of the amen break is its really distinctive drone in the treble range. even if you can't hear the details, just catching that aspect of the sound establishes a specific vibe.
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Definitely, the treble range allows it to be so malleable, like middle eastern hand drums, darbukas etc. More bassier breaks don't nearly cut up as well as much, it almost demands that you make your tunes techy. Amen tunes go better with the soulful vibe of 94-95.

But if we go back to 93, hear the break in this, and it almost demands it to be techno-y

 
M

muser

Well-known member
thirdform said:
To be fair I can't get on with her records because there's too much negative space, but not as a rhythmic augmentation like you get in jungle or even (coughs) dubstep or dub reggae.

I prefer Alva Noto's early 2000s work for that sort of thing. Digital abstraction but still full of dynamic changes.
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Alva noto is the perfect digital laptop music. I used to listen to him a lot through my laptop speakers out of choice because it sounds like the components in the machine have found their own voice, circuitry breaking out of the digital realm and communicating with you directly.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
wektor said:
just realized why do I dislike some of the hyperpop newschool stuff so much.
the sound design might be good but it simply does not make sense.
ie why in the fuck is this giant morphing blob opening a can of soda now?
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i think this is really the disconnect with me and a lot of my peers. i've definitely spoken against 'sound design for its own sake' vis a vis ~deconstructed club~ on here before.
the older microhouse/-adjacent stuff third was posting feels more detail oriented, like smaller discrete objects in a dance, and less of a kind of sweep across the stereo field, or a crunch or a crash that takes up the entire soundspace that you hear in emily glass or chino amobi (two 'deconstructed' producers im actually quite fond of).
there's also a difference of emotional territory, that these two (hypothetical) schools of sound design satisfy different but not disconnected urges. one (deconstructed club) likened to sound design in high-budget film and the other (microhouse/glitch/breakbeat-mutations) to ... ?

the sophie quote shiels posted reminds me of an electroacoustic composer who said much the same, that the pop music of the future for them would have been compositions that simply modulate a drone. that take one note/chord on a synthesiser and the play of parameters -is- the progression of the composition. and that has been realised in our time.

thirdform said:
Definitely, the treble range allows it to be so malleable, like middle eastern hand drums, darbukas etc. More bassier breaks don't nearly cut up as well as much, it almost demands that you make your tunes techy. Amen tunes go better with the soulful vibe of 94-95.

But if we go back to 93, hear the break in this, and it almost demands it to be techno-y

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this holds true for my experience of trying to avoid the amen break because it's 'too easy' to make something passably good with it. you can't be as loose with say al green's 'i'm glad your mine' and have it sound satisfying the way you can kind of shithouse the amen break. where by the time you've made a different break sound good what you've made is no longer recognisable as any sort of breakbeat, you may as well have used a drum machine or pre-cut samples

giving all the tunes posted here a cursory listen (on laptop speakers!) as i add them to the rolling Homies Music playlist and will comment on them when they're all in there and i give em a second listen (sometime in the next ~48 hours)
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
i guess as a postscript - there's definitely an arms race going on comparable to (or maybe continuous with) what happened as synthesisers and samplers first dripped down into pop music. but the difference is the hardware has not changed a ton in the past decade, people have developed their own 'design languages' (for lack of a better term, maybe it's perfect for the metaphor of the OP?) as we've gotten more familiar with the software. and design language is not always/or even usually a metaphor. i've still not once cracked open max msp
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
it's an intensive relationship with software rather than an extensive one with the accumulation of new hardware that fuels this. the barter 6 was like an opening shot in this war in rap production, and i don't think the setup for it was even that complicated, as far as i'm aware (never used nexus) there's a lot of nexus presets on it. but kicks have gotten Gummier and basslines have gotten more Sinuous, synths have gotten Glittier. the textural turn in rap and techno
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
but its a good word glitter is a key thing they are trying to capture the way it turns in the air and flashes as it captures the light, the way it overloads the eye
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
chillwave/its continuum (real) is 100% continuous with glam rock but it aproximates the phenomenon of glitter and glamour much better than glam rock's midrange-heavy guitar fuzz-hitched to-analog synths
 
M

muser

Well-known member
You could compare stop motion effects, prosthetics etc to analogue music of 70s early 80s and digital synthesis to the advent of CGI. becoming less and less likely to date, more hyperreal and uncanny, it isn't as easily characterised anymore. Analogue sounds sounded alien but were always distinctive and indicated a specific time and the same with early cgi and stop motion there was character to it, even early digital synthesis . Now both worlds are moving into this kind of shimmery hyperreal place both despite, as other_life says, the technology not really changing much on the music side of things.
 
wektor

wektor

Well-known member
other_life said:
i guess as a postscript - there's definitely an arms race going on comparable to (or maybe continuous with) what happened as synthesisers and samplers first dripped down into pop music. but the difference is the hardware has not changed a ton in the past decade, people have developed their own 'design languages' (for lack of a better term, maybe it's perfect for the metaphor of the OP?) as we've gotten more familiar with the software. and design language is not always/or even usually a metaphor. i've still not once cracked open max msp
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all of dissensus is cracking max msp open this weekend come join us
 
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