distribution points

ohman

Member
something analgous happens when the record is manipulated with the hands and it does move past the blockiness and into a completely different condition that is very true
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
all this makes me think about science stuff i was doing. ways of sampling curves (more points, more accurate / fluid); compression (retaining the minimum info for the maximum effect

music: a sinuous violin solo in which every note is fluid with the next; the hand and arm mapping a continuous complex shape in space? versus like stockhausen who is very crude but by leaving gaps in the musical thought creates a very different feeling of movement?
citing stockhausen as an example of crudeness/leaving gaps in the motion rendering is so backwards from how i hear things it makes my head spin.

suppose its 1955 and one of the only three sounds you can to make your track is a super short, nondescript pitched percussive noise. what can you do with that? most people including me would probably use it to create a simple kick drum pattern, or maybe a riff of some kind. not a lot of points. for what stockhausen, on the other hand, did--take the first few seconds here. a cloud of cosmic bubbles that descends, partially evaporating into reverb, then splits into to two different ascending trajectories all in the span of 10 seconds. (but, obviously more distribution points doesn't automatically equal better music.)

maybe a specific example of what you're talking about would be something like this.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
citing stockhausen as an example of crudeness/leaving gaps in the motion rendering is so backwards from how i hear things it makes my head spin.

suppose its 1955 and one of the only three sounds you can to make your track is a super short, nondescript pitched percussive noise. what can you do with that? most people including me would probably use it to create a simple kick drum pattern, or maybe a riff of some kind. not a lot of points. for what stockhausen, on the other hand, did--take the first few seconds here. a cloud of cosmic bubbles that descends, partially evaporating into reverb, then splits into to two different ascending trajectories all in the span of 10 seconds. (but, obviously more distribution points doesn't automatically equal better music.)

maybe a specific example of what you're talking about would be something like this.

There's a mathematic preciseness you can get with the drumkit though.

Think about this. anything extra than the drum machine and a 303 would be extraneous to the intention of the music, by having more distribution points you would paradoxically not have any because the music would have nowhere to go.


 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'd say stockhausens music is not very geometric.

I mean, like a lot of those big bods, it's hardly music as we know it, not even in the sense of free jazz. But that's for another discussion I think.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
there's a sort of conceptual distribution point element to minimalism which the likes of terry riley, Steve Reich never quite got. like being very strict, knowing what to leave out.

Especially with reich he completely didn't get it, hence music for 18 musicians, which is true dance centric minimalism gotten all wrong.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
Think about this. anything extra than the drum machine and a 303 would be extraneous to the intention of the music, by having more distribution points you would paradoxically not have any because the music would have nowhere to go.
there's a sort of conceptual distribution point element to minimalism which the likes of terry riley, Steve Reich never quite got. like being very strict, knowing what to leave out.
yeah you can obfuscate a motion by over complicating its rendering
 

entertainment

Well-known member
i've thought sometimes along similar lines but more in terms of whether there is an affective dimension to it

does a chord progression structure correspond to a particular affective logic vs. more fluid tonal movements.

if we think of the logic of chord progression in affective terms, it is a logic that favours buildup and catharsis, discrete pivot points in emotional time. this form calls attention to the song as a narrative construct: an abstracted, idealized representation of life.

the antagonistic form, the fluid music, corresponds to a more phenomenological representation of life. one that prioritizes the nature of emotion in itself, concrete and unsymbolic.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
a third antagonist to the fluid and the ordered is the destabilized, the free and chaotic, as in jazz. what bahktin called the carnevalesque, representing the disordered barrage of the sensory-affective now, polyphonic and heterogeneous
 

version

Well-known member
There's an idea taking shape in my head that says there is music that traces the entire arc of a movement in real continuous time, and other that works as a series of jump cuts, so that there are sections of the tape missing, you find yourself leaping from point A to B without having been lead there. What is your opinion on that

Reminds me of OPN talking about having made vertically dense music and deciding to the flip the axis horizontally,

"So now I have a plane—a horizontal plane with very particular musical objects, in almost like a tableaux format."

This old PS1 game, Vib-Ribbon, did something similar by generating side-scrolling levels for a character to navigate based on whatever CD you stuck in the console.

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That visual score for Ligeti's Artikulation. The gaps in the piece coupled with the discrete objects of the score make it feel like a series of points or occurrences rather than a continuous piece.

 
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version

Well-known member
» One can conceive of a continuous acoustic flow that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow: notes? Aggregates of notes? No? What will we call the new sound from a musician? «

Always liked this. Makes me think of music as sticking pins in a map or diverting water or electricity rather than creating something. Shaping rather than generating.
 
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