I agree. Yet all of this is only as good as the mind which manipulates the samples. The one area where I feel VSL has not excelled is in the dynamics of legato samples, which are being played at a rapid pace. All of these libraries suffer when you want to write a line which moves quickly and or angularly, through harmonies etc, this is where the midi sound becomes apparent. If a composer (not a film composer) is lookimg to create music which is dense and attempts to write many notes, it fails. Listen to all the mock ups, they generally have fewer notes, and or the lines which do not extend over the bar lines. When you listen to great composers they are not limited by this. I have not heard a digital performance where the music is thick with lines and harmony, they are usually snipets of this. Do you know of any digital composers who have mock ups, which really get into the shit. In 10 years this thought will have been answered.

@PolarBear said:

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.

@PolarBear said:

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.

Working with real people is way more interesting. The collective spirit can not be replaced with the ever same sounding samples

gus t silis -  no, that is not true, as it is very possible to do fast legato and fast transitions of various articulations.  Also, I just completed a piece that has a HUGE number of notes with VE. In fact, it had so many notes that the live orchestra that tried to play it previously completely failed. But I was able to realize it as originally imagined with VE.

I agree with Vibrato, though Polarbear - and keep in mind i am not trying to always contradict you,  it is just that you bring up some interesting points -  I disagree with the van Gogh analogy.  Because he was working with oil painting, which to my mind is the greatest medium of art that exists in regards to practical use (probably along with poetry).  Because once you have a basic setup that anybody can get - an easel, some paints, a pallette, a little linseed oil and turpentine, and a sunny room - you can do ANYTHING that has ever been done in the medium.  If you have the ability within your mind.  And van Gogh was able to obviously, and he could change whatever he did at will.  The composer has always been hampered compared to that freedom of expression - by orchestra directors, musicians, circumstances of various kinds - and has not had that freedom.  But if you can get the software and computers working o.k. samples can approach the ideal state of art, which is a painter happily working in his studio. 

 Please send me some of this piece you speak of.

@William said:

It is beyond what is going on now in the concert hall, what is going on in any live recordings.

Believing an orchestral composition made with samples is comparable with the real thing, is like being a Sheik with a harem of inflatable women.

gusttsilis -

I will have it ready within about a week.  thanks for the interest.  I must also mention though, Guy Bacos and Jay Bacal as well as some others for doing pieces that are extremely complex and densely scored. Guy's concerto style pieces are great, and Jay's performance of the Vaughn Williams Fantasia was an example that is about as dense and complex string writing as has ever been composed in tonal music.

Ultimately any analogy will fail, because it's just that, an analogy - while having a pattern in common things are still different. You of course may disagree, because I also somehow already expected that, in the hope for a lively conversation and discussion about this topic. Yet I try to stress these parts, where such an analogy would apply, and disregard those, where it won't. The painting artist may "sample" a piece from the sunny room where he's in, or have a look out the window and just paint what he is seeing there. Musicians are very limited in their possibilities to imitate nature. But both, composers and painters, could perform their art from materializing the things that cross their minds or how they feel it should be done. Also van Gogh followed common painting rules or formed up his own for a certain piece, so he wasn't completely free in his mind when painting, just like a composer who has to think of instrument ranges or possible playing techniques. With today's synthesis methods we could "build" a violin going down to A-2 - is that desirable? Isn't it more interesting to see, how a composer would solve the "problem" with the tools he got at hand, a score sheet, pen and paper (or virtually said: midi channels)? That's a different view of what van Gogh was doing with easel and paints, and the flower in the painting being virtual as well.

The way I see it, the difference is, that the tools for a simple or complex painting always have been affordable while the tools of composing were unaffordable for most, even talented and/or successful composers. Sample libraries do change that, guys like you and me are able to lay down fractions of their ideas. But we are limited - we can do what the tools allow us to do. If we want 3 horns, we could write that down on the staffs, the samples for this idea have yet to come. We can approximate by going along with 4 being similar in sound. However the idea was another thing. We adapt all the time to this set of unwritten rules, fooling ourselves constantly into thinking we would deal with the real deal. So I could also argue, that a huge number of notes in your composition also could be at least recorded with metronome in a few takes of certain sections and maybe even performed at once with enough rehearsals. Yet you unconsciously put up with what samples gave you, putting up sample after sample what was already there. If van Gogh could have produced a brighter, more colorful yellow or a darker black, perhaps those would have substituted things that seem "perfect" to us. Didn't you think once that a more harsh staccato would have fitted that passage better? The evolution has still many fields to approach to allow for painter's freedom.

All the best,
PolarBear

@lgrohn said:

"The painting artist may "sample" a piece from the sunny room where he's in, or have a look out the window and just paint what he is seeing there. " Artists don't do that way. They paint what they feel.

@lgrohn said:

Actually some visitors could distinguish out which painting on the wall that was "playing" at that moment.

Sappho and Alcaeus?

@PaulR said:

Many of these people should indeed spend more time in sunny rooms - surrounded by men in white coats.

Accurate definition, except for the sunny rooms

@lgrohn said:

Actually some visitors could distinguish out which painting on the wall that was "playing" at that moment.

This is an example of what I was talking about when I mentioned "rules" artists are applying to, unconsiously or consciously. It could be self-contained art if there was a single artist, but if there's two, one had to adapt the others concept and isn't really "free" in his mind. Otherwise both things won't match at all or the chance is ridicously little.

@lgrohn said:

"The painting artist may "sample" a piece from the sunny room where he's in, or have a look out the window and just paint what he is seeing there. " Artists don't do that way. They paint what they feel.

They can paint a flower because they (and we) do have an abstract concept about what a flower would look like. That also works for a chair or a table. It also has to do with how things are named: Ferdiand de Saussure described those concepts with a two sided picture of "signifié" (about a thing's content/concept) and "signifiant" (about the matierialized thing or spoken word). Artists may as well feel the concept of a scene like I pictured it, and portray it, which isn't really possible with music (just with things like a bird's tweeting or a thunder's rolling may be imitated). The art here starts as you said, when artists think beyond the real boundaries and start to create new concepts out of the exisiting ones to a point where the art's concept may not be recognized as a follow-up to existing concepts anymore.

PolarBear 

"Too many artists and musicians pretend that the rubbish they produce is what was intended in the first place.

Far too many people pretending to be musicians simply make noise and call it art.

Many of these people should indeed spend more time in sunny rooms - surrounded by men in white coats." - Paul R

This is one the most profound statements ever made about modern art.

BTW I like modern art. However I also spend time in gloriously sunny rooms surrounded by men in white coats.

Every once in a while there are thoughts thrown out there that reveal significant trends in the way we think.  This might be one of them.  For me, though, this string represents a potentially disturbing direction in the way we view music and music production.  I think it also reveals a separation from actual musicians and live performances that will  not help us at all in producing great digital/virtual music. Stretching a bit, it might also reveal very signficant unintended arrogance about the digital music field that, if adopted, could negativel impact the art of digital music production for a long time.

Not sure where to begin and definitely don't feel I'm equipped to respond, but I'll give it a shot.

Glenn Gould quit playing live performances altogether at the age of 32 and played only on the radio and in recording studios the rest of his life.  That said, I feel strongly that he would not agree with the idea that digital/virtual instruments would ever at any time now or in the future, be able to do something better than he could in making a great recording.  In any live performance there are parts of the performance that are more "genius" or "inspired" than others.  Gould felt that in the studio, you could play something a number of times and piece the "genius" or "inspired" parts of each one together to create a better result.  This is sort of like takig all the Masters golf tournaments that Jack Ncklaus every played and piecing together the best of each of the 18 holes, resulting in a 54, a score that has never been shot "live" (59 is the best "live" performance by a golfer).  However, I feel confident Gould would say it was still the inspiration of the human themself that allows the best recording to be made, not the sterile perfection possible through digital/virtual instrumentation.

And Glenn Gould is a near perfect anamoly among musicians.  Such an insignificant number of musicians and live music composers would agree with him that it makes using him as a proponent of digital music being more "evolved" a very weak pillar to stand on.  (Don't get me wrong, I think digital music has a huge present and future).

Toward the end of his career, Leonard Bernstein refused to allow anything he did to even be recorded unless it was a live performance.  Another famous soloist who slips my mind (Horowitz, Rostropovich or someone of that status) felt that way most of their career.  Almost every musician I know feels the best recordings they have done come from the live stage.  Why?  Because music is a HUMAN interactive medium where the audience, context, mood, day, time, place, humidity, etc. both challenge and inspire, creating difficulties as well as special moments that could never be reproduced in a studio.  To think that the most "evolved" music doesn't involve musicians is a bit like saying the most evolved Broadway plays do not involve any live performance or audiences, just digital voices, digital instruements, and laugh tracks.

Is this just a classical musician's bias? 

Oteil Burbridge, one of the great bass guitarist of our time says:  "If I could, I would only record live," he said. "I would just do live CDs and live DVDs, probably, for the rest of my life".

Removing the human being from any equation does two things.  It creates a more consistent result either good or bad, and in doing so, removes the possiblity for that special recorded experience that simply cannot be captured through the implementation of technology.  Technology cleans up the whole human mess involved in making music, it also removes the magic that comes from that humanness.  

The other thing that disturbs me about this is that in order to really begin to entertain this argument as an exciting present or even future possibility communicates to me that we have lost touch with the discipline and apprenticeship of learning music itself, and feel we transcend all those hours of daily practice because we can make it all happen digitally.  The best digital composers I know have the deepest roots in the disciplines of learning their scales, being able to make great music live on stage, and years of experience making music come alive in front of an audience.  Making that kind of magic gives us the imagination to begin to attempt to reproduce it in the digital world.  Thinking that we can fully capture it there tells me we probably never experienced it enough to realize how uniquely human the "inspired" experience is.

Just some technical support for this notion - There are a half dozen major schools of classical styles (German, French, Italian, Russiona, American, English, etc.), all with unique sounds (darker, brighter, richer, smoother, etc.), playing styles, etc.  Some are better at producing Mozart, others better for Stravinsky, others better for Pop, etc.  This is true of all the intrument groups.  VSL's samples are built almost exclusively from just one of these many schools.  Then you have the personalities of soloists who make the very same piece of music sound unique in each instance.  Then the venues, the audience "energy", and all the other variables that go into making music magical - let's be glad we can fool people and create a consistent product via the digital world.  And let's continue to strive to reporduce as best we can what happens in live performances.  The more we know and love live performance, the better we will become at producing digital music.  The more we think we've evolved into something better than the live performance, the more likely we will produce something the human beings won't want to listen to.

This post reveals the extreme bias towards performers and performance, rather than composers and composition, that is so characteristic of the classical music establishment.

For your information I was in that establishment for years, am a product of it, and find it a disgusting and snobbish System whose purpose is to enforce uniformity of thought and obliterate individuality of artistry.  I wonder what the film composers here would think if they heard the sarcastic and arrogant dismissal of all film music that was normal at the University music department I attended.  Film music is in fact the only truly vital music being done right now with symphony orchestras.  The concert music field is a government-subsidized snob festival that exists mainly as a fashion statement for the rich. So don't think that you are on a higher plane, illuminating the poor wretches who never understood what music truly is because they didn't graduate from a narrow-minded academic thought-control institute.

In your post you keep on stating digital music is cut off from musicians.

IS A COMPOSER A MUSICIAN? 

Answer that question.  No?  Yes? 

And if so, why is it wrong for that musician to want to use samples, rather than live performances, because he can control every element precisely, the way a painter is able to control the exact nature of his colors and brushstrokes? 

I do not view music as mainly overrated "virtuosi" showing off in a concert hall and "Oh, by the way, the music was written by so-and-so."  I view what the composer does as the essence of music, and that is IMAGINATION of sound within his mind. That is the true music.  And however it can be most perfectly realized is the best music. 

Also, as for Glenn Gould's eccentricity   - WHO CARES??? So your attitude is, "well that guy is a weirdo, so I am not having anything to do with him."  That makes me WANT to have something to do with him, because I am bored stiff by normal people.  And he was a serious composer, and would certainly LOVE samples as being a means of directly realizing the imagination of sound within his mind.

I find your whole point that this thread is "disturbing" because it takes music away from live performance absolutely wrong.  Because live performance is NOT the definition of music.  It is simply a recreation of what a composer imagined. And often a very poor recreation.