Recognizing and owning up to your own arrogance.

[jancivil]

To notice this is not to say any modi operandi is in itself this or that. Loops in sensu stricto are audio clips. I've used extensive bits of audio that were not me deciding on note-ons or determining really any of it except starting pitch, if that even applies. Well, determining where it ends is something.

- Musique Concrète, yeah?

It's actually funny that I find some parallels here with Amon Tobin and certain discussions about him or discussions that were derivatives of his work (see "spectral morphing" topics). You see, when he steered more towards musique concrète direction from the trip-hop (or whatever it was), a lot of people turned curious as to how he made those sounds in ISAM. So eventually you get this buzzword, "spectral morphing". It's all about that.

I won't go into more detail of these discussions, but let's just put it this way; nobody ever actually mentions that Amon Tobin himself has already been doing music for 15 years at least by the time ISAM was released. A lot of the methods he used in ISAM already came from his past. Sound manipulation? Well he his debut album was called Bricolage and you can guess why. He had another album, "Foley Room". Again, you can guess.

Interesting! My friend FB-shared an article on Loscil (Scott Morgan) last nite. Morgan prefers recording things to synthesis, a lot of which one might tend to receive as synthesizer. The unstable aspect of electrical device sounds, pitchwise and so forth. ("I struggle with synths." I would advise him to look at Skanner, Kontour...) (And Morgan has been doing music for like 15 yrs.) But what I read reminded me of Alan Splet.

So 'Musique Concrète', which was a thing a long time ago, was all collecting sound on tape and manipulating it, an early form of 'Electronic Music'. When I was at SFCM that semester, I concentrated on 'Electronic Music Lab' and found that the Buchla II was going to take far, far too much time (I was working for a living now) but there were tape recorders, the Otari mastering machine had a splicing board attached, and there were razor blades and white grease sticks to mark your edit points with.

SB and I are huge fans of Alan Splet (Eraserhead, and a number of films, Lynch and otherwise) who only ever approached sound design from recording things (electrical hums, for instance; he (and Lynch) would go to such extremes to capture the right tones from the environment). SB commented that the thing right before the end of my The Lost Time was Spletlike, which is funny because that is a synth tail into an elaborate Guitar Rig chain, the very thing Splet hated.

So I guess this might be similar to what you mean? Obviously this is very different thing because these discussions are actually rare (to my knowledge) so they don't bother as much (and the tools in question are often not actually acquired by people, so they don't directly encourage anyone). And yes, I just now came up with this observation. I've seen plenty of those discussions but never thought about them this way.

Yeah, no, there aren't a lot of expansive threads. This kind of thing is the richest soil here, people will comment on how bad it gets, but the contentious stuff is where thought is driven, here.

[jancivil]

...music "can do so much" - the myriad, multivarious intents of human communication. music can be used with the intent to confuse, bewilder, and create a state of fascination.. to impress, dazzle..

this may not be something that truly resonates with the composer, if eg. they are conveying some other quality in their music, fascination may not be a part of that, and therefore lacks the apparent appeal, attraction of composition that is intent on drawing, seducing, luring the listener.

it seems to be widely acknowledged ("lie to me, like they do it in the factory") that the industry has some implicit intent to appeal to the consumer (...) on the surface, how can an honest person compete with a prostitute? especially if they have a finite amount of attention in which to present themselves to the audience. there are imo wider issues, but consider.. someone who wants to be kind to their audience may be at a disadvantage in appeal to someone who is only interested in using their audience.

I go with fascination, I mean I want to dive deep into fascination, of sound and of elucidating hints of instruments, the rhythm and ultimately melodic lines, implicit in or suggested by a texture.

I don't have intent as far as another person's reception goes. I happen to like some things a lot of other people like, and I get more attention from the lead guitar aspect accordingly. Or the more elemental 'rock' thrust.
There are times when I feel an urge to make something really shaped like commercial music is shaped, one to see how close I get (while doing something for myself, and even subversively) and two to see if that would literally be commercial. It's not that I don't feel I have the chops to make a hit record, it happens that my interests are mostly elsewhere even as I feel that urge and it would take some time (and possibly some expenditure materially).

A prostitute is expert at making people come. I can do that... do I want to lure people in? Maybe, but the prostitute that is a going concern in the music industry has a GIGANTIC Pimp going for her.

And lookit, The Beatles would be impossible today (let alone a Frank Zappa). There are really talented people that sell those millions of units but they aren't going to risk (aren't ALLOWED TO risk?) suddenly becoming explorative and reflective in 'Art'. And as people were shaped by certain forces which could even tend to preclude this behavior utterly.

But let's put LSD in the water supply and see who copes, and how.

[Jace-BeOS]

As to the original post and inquiry:

I've never had reason to feel arrogant in the context of music creation. I have always been aware of my lack of formal skills. Music instruction never helped me, because the instructors only wanted to teach me via notation. My neurological makeup makes learning notation impossible. So I've made music in spite of my deficits, not because of any brilliance or genius.

I cannot perform on any instrument (barring my own vocal cords), so I have no sense of superiority whatsoever. I never found music creation to be easy and I've always had very high standards for what I consider good music.

In production, I don't know mixing and mastering well at all; managing frequency landscapes is too much like mathematic mental processing for me to get good at it. I know I have habits that work against good mixes. I'm very keenly aware of how inferior my mixes are compared to the CDs in my music collection.

I'm not prolific at all (due to the difficulty I find in making music).

So, I've no need to own up to any arrogance there, I think.

However:

• I had an awareness of how poor the timing and vocal skills were of two singer-songwriter type guys I tried to work with. Despite not being able to play guitar as much as they could (I think they just memorized a few dozen chords but I don't have the dexterity for even that), I still thought they sucked. Is that arrogance?

• I had an awareness of another guitar playing friend having no sense of song structure. He preferred to noodle away on electric guitar for many minutes. It was good playing, I guess, in a free form jazz sort of way, but he was so loose with structure that he was failing to make what I consider "songs". I took one of his pieces and made it a bit more of a standalone composition, turned it up a notch, and gave it a more expressive vocal (replaced his with mine, trying to capture what he seemed to be going for). He didn't like it, but I thought it was finally a song.

Is it arrogance for me to have that opinion of his work? The Taxi music service told him the same thing. His music was too amorphous. He was irritated to find that the service he paid to tell him what to change was telling him to make music he didn't want to make.

I think it's arrogance to presume you can be paid substantially just for indulging your own whims, rather than putting effort into self discipline and aiming at a specific target. Some people manage to make careers out of doing only the kinds of things they feel like doing, at their whims, but those are the lucky few, and often also the connected lucky few.

I think that some people are a bit touchy on the subject of "accomplishments without the requisite investment of effort". I am too, I admit; I don't like seeing people easily succeed in things due to their good luck and connections when I've put out serious effort and not had the same luck and connections. It's a human emotion. But, in the context of music, I also lack the OPTION of attaining the music theory knowledge some musicians strongly believe should be required of all musicians. I'm not going to become any kind of success, so I don't think I'm apt to earn anyone's resentment for not "paying into the system" from scratch. But then again, that's part of what my last boss hated about me: he seemed to think I had cheated my way into white collar jobs and not suffered like he had...but he hired me, and he is a sociopath, so it's not really my issue anyway.

Now, outside the music subject:

I know I'm considered arrogant on various topics. Some subjects I really do have a much better understanding of than the average person. I've sought and acquired the knowledge, and therefore I feel justified in expressing/sharing it.

I also used to have a near eidetic memory (unless numbers are involved) and I was known by at least one friend to have a superior recall of events, and therefore was trusted when I stated my recollection of events. It was an earned status (age and psychiatric drugging has somewhat taken this from me).

Some subjects I'm still in the "slightly more tuned-in, but not really fully aware" category. I sometimes get carried away with opinion, speaking as if it is fact. I try to watch that on subjects I don't know as well as my statements suggest, but I'm not perfect and I know I get carried away at times. I try to own that.

I try to express my knowledge clearly and without aggression, but an insecure person will take issue with being told they are incorrect, no matter how you tell them. Many people think they have a right to have their ignorance treated as equal to someone else's knowledge. Many people think "opinion" excuses them from criticism. I don't tolerate that because that's the kind of "political correctness" that disgusts me. If such people think I'm arrogant for correcting their BS, especially when I'm citing my sources, then too bad for them.

I try to take criticism when it's legitimate (not when it's character assault). I don't see why other people can't learn the same humility. But I guess that's the problem with ignorance: they don't know what they don't know. I can understand it, and even empathize with "not knowing", but I don't at all empathize with the rampant anti-intellectualism. When people characterize intellect as arrogance, for no reason other than their own insecurity, I would rather side with the "arrogant person" then the insecure jackass. If the arrogant person turns out to be a dick, then I'll blow them off equally while still respecting the accurate information shared by the arrogant dick. Arrogant knowledge is better than arrogant ignorance.

[Aleatoriac]

But let's put LSD in the water supply and see who copes, and how.

[Functional]

Well, yeah, you're sensing me accurately, & vis a vis the dynamics here... all of that.
But this forum doesn't owe me anything. (I'll be arrogant and take up some space here though)
And, hey, I'll celebrate Festivus a little bit, why not. ("I got a LOTTA PROBLEMS with you people..." )

You're busting my balls here! I bought this awesome used computer from a friend of mine and here I was thinking that this night, I'll be spending with setting it up and finally free myself from the chains of low ram, Phenom II X6 1100T (this thing should be in the museum already) and all that jazz. But alas, can't be helped, here I am. Tough life.

This is demonstrably NOT a music forum. It is a consumer forum, for plugins and other offshoots of DSP development. And some tangential boards, DYI, hardware.
Very little discussion of music happens here. The thrust is Production = Music. Maybe there shouldn't even BE 'Music Theory' board.

I have to sort of ask here with curiosity, is there a place you could possibly recommend with discussion about music in the internet?

I clarify muddy waters there, that's my thrust. I like threads which really stray and get into more interesting aspects once the OP has vacated the thing. But what I have provided amounts to whole books of knowledge up in there. Is that an arrogant statement? I don't owe these characters a thing here.

Personally I must say that it's actually quite more interesting (although takes much more time) to read through the discourse of people about all kinds of themes instead of reading through it by book. Not always, obviously, but like, really a lot of times.

Interesting! My friend FB-shared an article on Loscil (Scott Morgan) last nite. Morgan prefers recording things to synthesis, a lot of which one might tend to receive as synthesizer. The unstable aspect of electrical device sounds, pitchwise and so forth. ("I struggle with synths." I would advise him to look at Skanner, Kontour...) (And Morgan has been doing music for like 15 yrs.) But what I read reminded me of Alan Splet.

I think a lot of it has to do with the culture. They're really big into that kind of stuff in ambient music. I think to some extent it's also an illusion in itself. Synths can do amazing things if you're willing to invest your time into learning to program them. But I think there's this sort of mental block that (if you know the source to be a synth), that it cannot really "sound right" no matter the actual sound. i think that has manifested into an ideology itself. Good or bad thing? I wouldn't really know. Because even though some of these people go into really, f**king ridiculous lengths just to achieve some 1sec worth of audio on a record, it's still all part of the experience. I think that sort of attitude might be hurtful if it is forced on people "either you do it like us or you're not part of us", but this sort of attitude I've seen very, very rarely.

As an example https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/ ... nihilistic

For example, there's a sound in Cold Earth that is something like only one second of audio. It comes from an obscure old effect unit that cost us a lot of time and road miles to source, and it ended up being one second of audio on the record.

which is funny because that is a synth tail into an elaborate Guitar Rig chain, the very thing Splet hated.

Exactly, which is kind of why I think there's ideology in there. I mean ideology is everywhere in everyone (just ask Zizek), but you know, we get to see its fragments sometimes like this. It's' a weird world, really.

Yeah, no, there aren't a lot of expansive threads. This kind of thing is the richest soil here, people will comment on how bad it gets, but the contentious stuff is where thought is driven, here.

Yeah it often is like that in many places I've been. You know like, a lot of topics are like dropping a small stone into an ocean of endless depth. It gets only so deep as there are people observing the stone, i.e. discussing in the thread (if not, physical estimations can be made, yes, but the qualitative meaning is also lost, as it always is with quantitative statistics). After the observer (people discussing) is gone, so is the sense of depth.

EDIT: Damn I read it wrong. I thought "continuous" instead of contentious, which kind of changes a lot. Meh, I'm tired and my new computer is still sitting, lonely as ever, disconnected from its past

[xoxos]

darn that interesting to talk with jan.

[jancivil]

I have to sort of ask here with curiosity, is there a place you could possibly recommend with discussion about music in the internet?

Yeah, Facebook.
A 'composers' forum (literally, there is a forum called that) turns out to be not very different for me than KVR, oddly enough (wherever I go, there I am). The difference, Facebook is like, you can pick your friends but you can't pick your relatives. Here is more like your relatives. (Hence FESTIVUS!)

[jancivil]

Loscil (Scott Morgan) last nite. Morgan prefers recording things to synthesis...
("I struggle with synths." I would advise him to look at Skanner, Kontour...)
- reminded me of Alan Splet.

I think a lot of it has to do with the culture. They're really big into that kind of stuff in ambient music. I think to some extent it's also an illusion in itself. Synths can do amazing things if you're willing to invest your time into learning to program them. But I think there's this sort of mental block that (if you know the source to be a synth), that it cannot really "sound right" no matter the actual sound. i think that has manifested into an ideology itself.

- a synth tail into an elaborate Guitar Rig chain, the very thing Splet hated.

Exactly, which is kind of why I think there's ideology in there. I mean ideology is everywhere in everyone...

Sure. Beatles vs Stones is totally ideological. I remember Zappa's answer, rather than address the sort of flaw in the question, chose Stones, because 'blues', a totally ideological reply.

I like very little of Rolling Stones, mostly because I have little time for Mick Jagger 'singing'.
That may hint of ideology, but I think objectively he isn't doing very much. I grew up with jazz singers who have to bring a lot more to the thing than a personality. Or really a pose. He's a good actor.

[harryupbabble]

darn that interesting to talk with jan.

I have to say, it's interesting to read Jace's posts. Seems very lucid and great reading practice/challenge for people whose native tongue is not English and want to improve their English. And plus it has substance and most of it, people can relate to, I presume. I do.

But, it's not just Jace or Jan or you. Lots of people here makes sense, even the newbies because all newbie really means is that they have recently acquired membership but for all I know they have massive specialized knowledge and are super-sages.

[Jace-BeOS]

darn that interesting to talk with jan.

I have to say, it's interesting to read Jace's posts. Seems very lucid and great reading practice/challenge for people whose native tongue is not English and want to improve their English. And plus it has substance and most of it, people can relate to, I presume. I do.

But, it's not just Jace or Jan or you. Lots of people here makes sense, even the newbies because all newbie really means is that they have recently acquired membership but for all I know they have massive specialized knowledge and are super-sages.

My apologies for making my words a challenge. I'm a monolingual. I'm great with my own language, but I'd never be able to communicate in your native language, or anyone else's (I once tried to learn French and Japonese, but the opportunity went away with a relationship ending). So, many points to you for meeting people like me on my playing field

There are a lot of people here who have sensible things to say. I've always enjoyed the discussions here.

[harryupbabble]

What I meant is that by reading your posts, I suspect the reader who is into learning English is getting used to proper English whereas if I look at my own posts I'm like "Dude, you are not expressing yourself properly." But I look at your posts (and other posts) and I'm like "that's the proper way to express in English" and so maybe by reading posts like yours I am absorbing better ways to express in English. It make take me a while though. It's like that expression "rubbing off on me". I just hope that I am not "rubbing off" on other people whose native tongue is not English. I am pretty sure I am breaking all sorts of grammar rules.

[Jace-BeOS]

What I meant is that by reading your posts, I suspect the reader who is into learning English is getting used to proper English whereas if I look at my own posts I'm like "Dude, you are not expressing yourself properly." But I look at your posts (and other posts) and I'm like "that's the proper way to express in English" and so maybe by reading posts like yours I am absorbing better ways to express in English. It make take me a while though. It's like that expression "rubbing off on me". I just hope that I am not "rubbing off" on other people whose native tongue is not English. I am pretty sure I am breaking all sorts of grammar rules.

Actually, you're doing better than a lot of native English speakers I witness on a daily basis on Facebook.