[bane]

I guess I'm getting old, but the demo both looks and sounds like a man virtuoustically playing a pair of typewriters.

More seriously, I think this is cool, but a little overblown in someways, we've technically been able to do this kind of performance (using sliced up digital samples) for a very very long time -- decades. Digital sample machines, of many kinds of forms have been used in live shows for a long time. Think of your favorite 80's new wave band and they probably had live shows with digital synth triggering samples off of a keyboard.

I think this is more of a cultural shift than any kind of technological shift, but interesting nonetheless. The methods of playing these things is much more akin to being a drummer or an old school DJ scratchoff than anything else. But just like complaints about all modern music being overcompressed, these guys have to work off of only two performance vectors: sick beats and cool samples. There's no dynamics in the performance or playing with tonality. Glissando, spicatto, breath control, tonguing, etc. are all right out the window.

Music has been reduced to learning and playback a la guitar hero. A generation of musicians, messing around with samples from music they themselves could never perform.

We talk a lot about technology we no longer have the means to make and knowledge lost in fires and wars and natural decay, and toy with that idea in sci-fi and real life. However, today we certainly have a much greater pantheon of fantastic accomplishments in these areas.

But I wonder if we should consider a similar phenomenon with culture and cultural skills? We may be entering a time were previous cultural knowledge, like how to play piano virtuostically is lost, exchanged with how to play a sampler at similar high levels of skill. We may have lost the means to transmit that culture forward to future generations, but outside of a vague sense of loss, nobody really cares because what we have now is also vast and complex and has its own set of interesting skills that need to transmit forward.

Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make room for new stuff?

[randy909]

Totally with you up until the lost culture thing. More people know how to play the piano virtuostically than ever. Culture is expanding and being recorded permanently in the digital world. How are we losing it?

It reminds me of what the blue-man-group does. It's novel, a few people make a lot of money doing it, but it's not the next electric guitar by any stretch.

I think one of the core attributes of EDM is that it is performed by machines. The MPC-live thing seems like an effort to step backwards just to have something to do on stage. I'd rather listen to someone mix a 808/909/303 live. The subtle timing and tuning shifts they make are a thing of beauty (and laptops don't do this). But that's probably just my preference for techno over hip-hop/dubstep coming through.

Anyway, good article regardless.

[bane]

Yeah the 303 is a really interesting example, it offered several entirely interesting performance vectors, almost none of which were tied to actually playing the notes. Lots of people I know who used to do great 303 stuff barely even knew what the letter notes along the keyboard were. But the little knobs at the top gave them tons of ways to express the music that really aren't typical in traditional musical performance. (I'd have killed to have a freq cutoff and resonance cut off when I was studying classical violin).

[freshbreakfast]

"Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make room for new stuff?" To tell you the truth, yes. I make a few rhetorical leaps to get an argument across. I realize Araabmuzik is hardly the first midi controllist ever, he's but a bump in a continuum.

I disagree though with the 2 vectors thing. There's a whole lot of things you can do with tonality with machines. And as for "Glissando, spicatto.." etc, well, I personally think the human voice will be the one instrument that will always be "in".

Point being, I'm most excited to see all the different vectors these machines invent.

And sure, technically we've been able to do this for decades, but it's usually been a hidden process in the studio. It's the crossover to mainstream cultural acceptance and respectibility as a performance instrument. When hardware instrumenalists move tickets, that's what's interesting to me.