"Using samples is a old as musique concrete or older, I don't see anything new in using samples, or "the next step in the evolution of musical expression " as William suggests".- Angelo Clematide

If you don't see anything new I suggest you  put on some eyeglasses.  

Edgar Varese was using a TAPE RECORDER AND SCISSORS to do musique concrete, specifically on Poeme Electronique. 

Somehow I think Vienna Ensemble is not quite the same old thing...  

And surely there are unthought things like doing a brass legato phrase with the wind transition samples for the in between notes. Or having a piano release sample triggered for a timpani note. Time to free your mind ;) These couldn't be performed in a live situation or recorded in one go and would be a rather unusual, unavantgarde way of making music.

PolarBear

Yeah, I agree with that.  An example of someone doing things with instruments impossible to do with samples is Harry Partch creating all those odd instruments.  I am interested in using tam-tams in many ways in a new piece that would be useless to sample because you might as well just use a real one.  So this reveals a principle maybe - that with samples, we are talking about the "instrument" known as the symphony orchestra, as opposed to any individual one that is part of it.

When the "almost infinite number of new timbres using VSL" was mentioned, my first thought was that VSL has developed some new way of modifying the over tones (number, intensity) for VSL, because that's the only way to get really new timbres electronically. But it is not the case here. Now I understand what was meant. VSL just gives the possibility to combine different instruments easily.

Hey Paul, do you have anything for composers who are no longer budding but have gone to seed?

Trying to cut the "composing for samples" mentality with a budding knife, buddy? ;)

@William said:

Hey Paul, do you have anything for composers who are no longer budding but have gone to seed?

Paul,

do you mean this?

http://futuremusicmag.com/oncd.html

Hannes

Paul, Problem was that I found a lot of sites under the keywords "future music magazine" and thought this would come closest. But obviously the magazine I found does not accept any subscriptions any more, and maybe is not even the right one. Our local music dealer also does not know or have it.

Will try again, but if you find a link to their homepage in the editorial this would be very helpful. Since I am for sure interested in all the topics you mentioned.

Maybe I will even learn how to avoid sampled string chords :-))

Hannes

Great Paul, pm is on the way!

... at NSS because I can not pm here as it seems.

@PolarBear said:

There is orchestral sound and there is performing orchestra to me. We might agree that a good live orchestra in a concert hall performing is always superior to any recording, because the of technical limitations we still encounter with recording techniques, loudspeakers, different listening situations. But we should compare the comparable I think, too. There's always this catch with "fooling" someone... was he aware it could be samples? Even if not, would his opinion still hold true, if he had multiple chances to listen to it and really being able to absorb everything going on in there? Were the listening conditions adequate?

Would the opinion also hold true in an A/B comparison in the same listening situation? Probably some might disagree that this would be necessary... yet the sky is the limit for me: If we listen through a typical monitoring system we might not miss anything until we heard a superior one that has more low end or higher definition, anything else, you name it. The same way we might not miss anything in the mockup (and being fooled therefore) we would hear in a live recording. Isn't that a step backward then?

This reminds me of a similar situation with computer graphics (an another art form which I constantly compare to samples). A friend of mine recently bought a blu-ray and told me that many of the films now look entirely unrealistic as the better player just helps to show up the mistakes a lot clearer.

On Polarbears original statement Glenn Gould, who admittedly was rather eccentric, would probably not have agreed as he felt that recordings were SUPERIOR to live performances, because of all the distractions, noises, mistakes, etc. in live performance.  I tend to think that way in that I look of music as something that can be perfected and polished like a painting, not as a miraculous performance that somehow all came together perfectly.  Yeah, that is impressive when it happens, but i don't care that much as a great recording is something that is of lasting value.

The comparison to computer graphics is extremely interesting.  I have noticed the same thing even with SD DVDs on old movies - the grain and matte lines on special effects are often more visible on a good digital TV than in a theater.

Nice comment about DVDs here: But also HD media still has imperfections also that could be done better. 2K and 4K productions aren't the line's end either. We could add different handling or somehow lacking of spatial perception in here as well for all the media mentioned before. A conceptual imperfection.

William, I'm trying to imagine a "perfect" van Gogh painting. I can't. What would it look like? The imperfections do make it interesting. It's how he handled or stressed them. And then again - isn't the original thing which keeps the creative spirit the perfect thing and everything else a more or less perfect copy? I'm trying to imagine music with perfectly built instruments. They wouldn't have character. The same type of instrument would sound the same all over. Could we built a "perfect" ensemble sound out of those phasing beasts? Everything making me able to discern them would make one of them imperfect. Same goes for the player, though perfection here is usually a level of skill/gift. I agree that a studio recording or a rendition can be far more enjoyable than a live recording of the crowded auditorium. But I'd not be willing to set a rule as to where to draw the line between synthetic and authentic in terms of perfection here.

PolarBear

I agree with  vibrato that this is very interesting.   On what polarbear said I definitely do not mean I want things "perfect" as a result of polishing the "recorded" approach as opposed to live performance.  I love completely sloppy imperfections, and in fact think that everything digital tends to be far too perfect.  I just mean "perfect" in the sense of a creative artist or composer getting it perfect to his taste. And that is something that live performance - which is NOT the art but a reproduction of the art - is constantly screwing up, at least according to Glenn Gould and a few others.  I am obviously a belligerent defender of the Creator (i.e. the composer) as opposed to the Reproducer (i.e. the performer). And any suggestive similarity of the word Creator to any god or gods is purely coincidental. [H]

I do also love the sound of real performances and recently had the chance to attend Germany's KlassikRadio "Filmmusik in Concert" tour in Munich, and what they caputered onto CD from their Frankfurt session is just so much less. Though they made a really bad choice when using Yamaha onboard sound for Williams' celesta... Live performances of all kind could be breathtaking experiences, so could a good recording be in a suited listening environment. Yet with samples I did not have that great moments yet, aside from a few "wow, that can be done with samples already..." Maybe I'm too involved in things here and maybe an audio engineer will tell the same thing about different live recordings where he could think of a few ingenious gems and a lot of other so-so mumbling rumbling - it's still an ongoing evolution to come back to the topic again.

So to keep the van Gogh analogy - what is the "art" behind his paintings? It's different from music here - he had one try (maybe after a few drafts) - and that's it. And maybe then again not so different, in terms of samples being the draft for the original recording as widely common in film music these days. Which also puts things into another perspective for me - we have a tool that helps us to materialize our ideas, and it's getting better at that as well as house planning 3D software is. Yet the house is still built with solid bricks and wood, the real deal couldn't be projected on the ground only. The imagination may well be kept with projection, the real deal isn't.

All the best,

PolarBear