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by jerf
3471 days ago
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"If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but difficult." It depends on what you're using. You can get anything from a system that can't be pulled off of 12 tone equal temperament and some conventional time signature all the way up to systems that offer complete and total freedom, up to and including setting the exact values in the .WAV file you generate. I wouldn't say getting past those restrictions are "difficult" necessarily, it's just that by necessity, the more power you take on yourself to define your music, the more work you're going to need to do. By the time you end up with the systems that offer total freedom you have music synthesis systems that look more like programming than musical instruments. But they do exist, and back on the topic of the original article, there's a lot of avant-garde-style work that has been done in them. When I was going to school and minoring in electric music there was a guy playing with "granular synthesis"; his result sounded like telemetry. I'm not being particularly critical or cruel when I say that... that's seriously what his music sounded like. If you look at how telemetry is generated and compare to how granular synthesis works, it's not hard to see why. Tonality was entirely absent, let alone 12-tone equal temperament. |
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I actually have no idea what telemetry is supposed to sound like but I think this guy was just making bad music, with granular synthesis. Granular synthesis can actually be quite beautiful and tonal if thats what you're looking for, see examples [1] and [2] just to dig up some quick examples. Ableton's built-in time stretching uses granular synthesis. One guy's bad granular music isn't really indicative of anything.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6BU18mP3A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ8zaGuaeBk