so.. what is music?

I tell you one thing - all music used to have a much more profound effect on me before I started production...

I've always played piano, but since getting into the building blocks and real anal side of production, it's very rare music really takes me anywhere now... Getting into production heavily rationalizes everything - so it takes something far greater to transcend that...

I'm a big film fan too, but I'm reluctant to get too involved in film making or script writing... Right now, when I see a film I believe the illusion... I see the characters and appreciate the photography... But I can tell already, as soon as I start thinking about the cinematography and screenplay, it becomes a film set and a bunch of guys sat behind a camera...

I think it's why many producers who actually get good enough at hiphop, techno, dnb, etc... end up listening to jazz, avant garde, classical music... and treating production like a day job.

Now more than ever, 99.9% of the stuff on Boomkat just sounds to me like some mates messing around with an MPC and a copy of Logic...

  Paulie Walnuts said:

Now more than ever, 99.9% of the stuff on Boomkat just sounds to me like some mates messing around with an MPC and a copy of Logic...

haha... please justify this arrogance with a track/ep/album that your mates (or you, yourself) made while messing around with a MPC and a copy of logic... come on, go ahead... if you can't do that, well, i'll file you under 'pretentious'...

music?...umm doesn't ring a bell :grin:

this thread just attracts John Cage wannabe's imo

Most musicologists offer the explanation that human music making began with animal impressions. Guy hears bird, likes it, tries to make the same sounds. Singing.

He hears his heartbeat and starts walking in time to it. Then he starts tapping that sound on a log. Rhythm.

Later he hears a whisting sound from the wind blowing through a broken reed. He picks it up and blows through it. Instruments.

These are very primal responses which may be why there is such an emotional impact to music. No intellect bullshit in the way. It's also why the musically uneducated can't be bothered with real melodies or harmony of substance. Just a beat and an easy tune.

As for scales, the harmonic series offers the basis for scalar structure. When something vibrates partials of the surface are vibrating at faster rates, albeit with reduced power (amplitude.) They can be made audible though with proper tuning and extra loudness. Octaves and fifths sound good because they are early in the harmonic series. Halfsteps are disonant because they are later and similar enough that their vibrations counteract each other.

Some tones in the harmonic series don't fit easily into the chromatic scale. Not surprisingly, those tones are the ones that usually differ in different cultures of music.

  acid1 said:

this thread just attracts John Cage wannabe's imo

Think about it. According to dictionary.com the definition of music is:

The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre.

Not or, but and. This doesn't make any sense because if you hum to yourself "Mary Had a Little Lamb," by this definition, that's not music. It has no harmony, therefore it's not music. Harmony is vertical, lining up different sounds simultaneously. And what about the technique riboto? You play without a set rhythm or time signature.

We're just saying there's more to music than what's in the textbooks.

Art is never easily definable.

  iep said:

if you can't do that, well, i'll file you under 'pretentious'...

I'm genuinely surprised more people haven't already.

muzik iz art!!

Politically incorrect to be discerning these days?

I'd suggest that we're at a point now where even those rare, genuinelly decent electronic albums have been done...

It's depressing how for every step forward music takes, it has to take an even greater step backwards in many ways... More options = less focus

I may live, eat and breathe electronic music, but given 5 hours, could I find anything on Boomkat even worthy of being played next to an Eric Satie piano piece?

Much like with anime, I think the main appeal of electronic music is how great it could be... I think everyone's got that vision, and the nature of today's style of writing does make it much more disposable, so we keep pushing forward, but the goal line keeps getting moved back...

  The Moon said:

Politically incorrect to be discerning these days?

 

I'd suggest that we're at a point now where even those rare, genuinelly decent electronic albums have been done...

 

It's depressing how for every step forward music takes, it has to take an even greater step backwards in many ways... More options = less focus

 

I may live, eat and breathe electronic music, but given 5 hours, could I find anything on Boomkat even worthy of being played next to an Eric Satie piano piece?

 

Much like with anime, I think the main appeal of electronic music is how great it could be... I think everyone's got that vision, and the nature of today's style of writing does make it much more disposable, so we keep pushing forward, but the goal line keeps getting moved back...

You're thinking of it objectively.

this thread is really interesting!

I've been pondering about how music originated, copying animal sounds makes sense.

I like to bump this thread to see if more people are able to share their thoughts

wow, talk about time travel.

I didn't realize I posted the thread when I started reading it, and my initial reaction was, "okay, here's someone reading/thinking way too much into it". Which it pretty much was at the time.

Music is fun. We can have fun, can't we?

Humans are creative beings all around, it's what we're good at and what makes us intelligent (dance music). If you think of it that way, play, the importance of play itself.. It seems pretty natural that we'd create rhythm and tone out of sounds.

But I think Kcinsu is spot on when he said music is a spiritual experience, because it really is.

  Quote

It's depressing how for every step forward music takes, it has to take an even greater step backwards in many ways... More options = less focus

 

I may live, eat and breathe electronic music, but given 5 hours, could I find anything on Boomkat even worthy of being played next to an Eric Satie piano piece?

 

Much like with anime, I think the main appeal of electronic music is how great it could be... I think everyone's got that vision, and the nature of today's style of writing does make it much more disposable, so we keep pushing forward, but the goal line keeps getting moved back...

 

I like this bit.. But I don't think there is a goal line.

Music is SATAN trying to distract you from THE LORD.

AMEN (BROTHER)

is music still music if nobody's listening?

if anyone wants to read more about this kind of stuff, i highly recommend:

"this is your brain on music" by daniel levitin

i read it about a year ago, and not only does he delve into a lot of what you are all discussing here, he reveals studies that have drawn very curious parallels to different cultures, musically speaking - how certain elements of music have developed identically, but others have diverged wildly.

emotional connections to harmony and rhythm, and whether they are a result of conditioning or nature, that kind of thing.

in the early chapters, it's also a fundamental music theory primer, but in an unique way... it breaks things down from an analytical scientific perspective. i suppose there are those that would call it particularly "IDM" in tone and philosophy.

music for me contains so many more cazy confusing concepts that if touched upon open an even larger can of worms.

one of the confusing things I always think about is my learned appreciation for music. over the years you start to put great sway in the way someone has constructed an idea to the point where that can be the payoff, the clever harmony or amazing sound, it's such a tangible way to justify something being good but there is so much more than that going on sometimes. there are hugely simple tunes that can make me flip out, simple harmony melody and sounds etc, but sometimes it affects me so much I have to stop my car at the side of the road because I can't feel my arms! These tunes are almost always simple, and often have an emotional link ie dig for fire by the pixies has a huge link to the toy machine skate video and my life ten years ago when I was growing up. that one alwys kills me.

but there are other simple tunes that have the same effect, sparklehorse - comfort me an make me flip out and I only got into it 6 months ago, and it has a similar simplicity, how is that? where does it come from? confusing.

sound can go from amazing to rubbish with a split second of a note being held. does anyone know the song 'me and my arrow' by harry nillson, sampled by blackalicios. its a classic example of almost rubbish but just about brilliant. the first melody line 'me and my arrow' goes up a semitone for the word 'and', but its a really subtle shift its just a split second of a suggestion of that note and it makes the piece, sing it without that suggestion and the melody is awful. I always seemed to look at harmony as the way the chord tones interact to form a single sound, some kind of ratio between the notes in the chord, which seems pleasing to the ear next to the previous chord. but when something that happens for such a split second, and so subtly that the resulting waveform of a new harmony hasn't time to develop, as the melody in 'me and my arrow' it suggests to me that there is a hell of a lot more going on than I first thought. I could go on describing but it would be a long post!

then you get to sound on its own, no harmony needed and a synth sound can keep me interested for hours, thats another different idea. it just goes on and on.

I remember reading that there are more signal paths going from the brain to the ear than there are going from the ear to the brain, the brain tells your ear how to hear not the ear telling your brain what it is hearing. no-one is born being able to hear, it is learned over the first few years of your life. you are born with the equipment but ot the knowledge how to use it/interpret the results you are given. that is learned and goes a long way to explaining why people hear chords/sounds/whole songs radically different even with similar musical upbringings.

the point about satie is valid but he along with debussy, tchaicovsky etc was one of the top musicians of the time and its not as though he came from a time where everything else was as good as his stuff, just like today. I agree that you could scan boomkat for hours and not find anything quite as good but the reason we remember him now is that he was STANDOUT at the time, just as aphex is now or bill evans/the beach boys was in their time. music hasn't got worse or become stagnant, its just evolving in different ways. the sounds you use has become a huge thing in recent years and just as when new innovations occured in years gone by it will take a while before huge amounts of experimentation come up with TRULY genius stuff consistently, its a time of real change and very exciting.

I have a friend who was a GREAT musician in the traditional sense but now he is focusing on the many ways of making electronic music a performable, organic process, using monomes with reaktor etc. its all very interesting but there is so much emphasis on the creation of sound that the actual music is taking a back seat. very interesting and well put together yes but far from 'art', i'm a firm believer that as soon as all these technology's start to settle it will be another great time for music, when a monome style thing is so standard that you get it taught in schools then it will be common place and the genius kids will start to use it to make really great music. or maybe it will go back to instrument, i dont know, I just think that any new 'instrument' innovation in music has always taken a long time to get going and the infancy of electronic music means we shouldn't expect too much from it yet!

I've said about 20% of what I planned too, but i'm drunk and bad at writing so I'll leave it at that :)

i always like your replies welcome to the machine

i used to really love Me and My Arrow along with Poli High. Jump into the Fire also comes to mind when i think of Nilsson, though it's forever connected with Ray Liotta's coke freakout in Goodfellas.

the best songs for me are the ones that thrust me into visuals / daydreams to the point where i'm absolutely shattered if the song is interrupted or someone tries to speak to me. the only song i can think of off the top of my head is that minute after around 4:38 in Aphex Twin's 54 cymru beats where that distortion / twiddling kicks in. i become facial ticks, shallow breathing, and almost blind with abstract mental imagery. i've run red lights, stop signs, had lapses of memory.. the rest of the song is borderline bad the whole time, but i forgive it because i know where it's heading.

music is broader than any discussion about it and this topic title baffles me

i think you're right. it did start in the stone age with mothers singing to their babies. and the first tune they sang went a little like this... in a sweet stone age mother sounding voice.

ooga dooga boogie boo,

did you just goo poopie poo,

did you belch oh ooga coo