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  4. The Evolution of Orchestral Sound
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    @William said:

    But as Ligetti showed and I was trying to suggest with that allusion to his works, conventional orchestral sounds can create completely new timbres when used in a bizarre way.  Which is almost infinitely possible with VSL, due to the nature of their detailed recording process. 

    Can I find somewhere more about those new VSL timbres? What feature of VSL makes it possible?

    PS. The name is Ligeti, not Ligetti... 

    When György Ligeti would be alive and using samples for whatever reason, he may would use them in Csound, Max/MSP, SuperCollider or program them with C++ or some other audio programming language -- certainly would invent something new which is inexistent and we can't imagine in advance, and he rather would create his own samples. 

    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.

    By the way, the composer Pierre Henry is in the charts with his own remix of his "Dixième symphonie de Beethoven" (hommage à Beethoven) from 1979, and Pierre always made his own samples.

    .
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    "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...  
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    You're right Williams about not being limited, wasn't so well put by me in the first place. It's what I meant with creating and recreating stuff - being creative and going on from sampled snippets is of course possible and therefore no limitation to the creative mind. Yet while recreating or being creative with things that could be played in the real world is not so well possible to the point until somebody was able to sample it. I'm talkign about stuff guys like this one do here:

    - you can't pull this off a sample library with the basic reocrdings of a windchime. You can't pull off other things for strings with the merely "basic" set of samples we have (yet I'm talking about multiple 100GB worth of samples here) - you can't be creative in that way, so therefore samples are a limitation in this direction.

    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

    PS: Ever saw a trombone kazoo?
    :D 
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    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.
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    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.

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    For all you budding film composers - here's a suggestion. Get the January 2008 edition of Future Music and watch the quite lengthy DVD that comes with it on The Making of Stardust soundtrack. Steve McLaughlin is the sound man who works with Ilan Eshkeri and McLaughlin knows a bit about the 'sound' of an orchestra. So----if you're into the writing process and also the mics used at Abbey etc - this will keep you interested for a few hours.
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    Hey Paul, do you have anything for composers who are no longer budding but have gone to seed?
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    Trying to cut the "composing for samples" mentality with a budding knife, buddy? ;)
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    @William said:

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

    Hey Bill - I just watched Moonrise and Build my Gallows High - what the hell do think I'm gonna say? I went to seed years ago - but (in a Brooklyn accent) - I still got taste! - I don't mind going to seed - just so long as I'm the last one that goes! WTF am I talking about? :))) - You all should watch that article on the dvd - I guarantee it will cause an immediate an entertaining debate.
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    Paul,

    do you mean this?

    http://futuremusicmag.com/oncd.html

    Hannes
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    Come on now Hannes - I said January 2008 didn't I! :))))) - If you're interested in microphones, mixing, real orchestras, good soundmen, thoughts about sample libraries, etc etc - this is one of their good issues and a lot of footage on the dvd. --There's also an article and mp3's on - why NOT to play chords with string samples. Hmmmmm. ;)
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    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
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    I tell you what Hannes - pm me your address or PO Box no in germany and I will send you the dvd so you can watch it and send it back to me. I would have thought you could get this in Germany, but I am obviously mistaken.
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    Great Paul, pm is on the way!

    ... at NSS because I can not pm here as it seems.
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    OMG! OMG! Hannes!!!! What have you done!!! PaulR on Northern Sounds!!! This is my alter ego. He will kill me now!! OMG! OMG!
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    Just kidding Hannes - my secretary will post it tomorrow. I will of course expect you to make comments about this article re: 'Stardust' that's on the dvd. It is quite interesting and very long actually. I am surprised this magazine (which I normally don't read) is not available in Germany, but I guess you have a lot of your own music publications come to think of it - so why should you.
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    @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.
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    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.

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    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
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    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]