[PavlovsCat]

With computer music, the act of composition and the act of playing it are one and the same. It's like writing a piece, having an orchestra play it, then going back to the score sheet and changing something, over and over. Usually at some point time, patience and/or inspiration run out, long before the song is really good -- but that's a limitation of the state of the art(ists), not of music made with computers in general, IMHO.

[john61]

No it is not. There is no orchestra. There is an context less, static description of tones, called sheet music or MIDI. These description gets transformed to music whenever a musician plays it or to a set of soulless notes if a computer plays it.

[PavlovsCat]

As I said already, MIDI is kind of crude and hardly the last word. The description can be as detailed as the brain of the composer can handle it. The acts of composition and performance are indistinguishable. You could even manually set the amplitude of 44100 (or more) points per second if you wanted to... arguably the musicians that can make full use of the possibilities that exist even now haven't even been born yet.

Someone else made a very good point about paintings, and you kind of missed it by saying computers can't paint like Da Vinci or Shakespeare -- of course they can't, just like a brush or a pencil can't, and just like a piano can't compose. Do reprints of Shakespeare's work have soul in your opinion? And do they have more, less, or just as much soul than exact reproductions of his original handwriting? Is it possible to communicate soul by typing as we do right now, or would we have to see and smell the hands doing the typing for that, and heads pausing in reflection? Can a photo made with a DSLR and tweaked in a RAW converter have soul? Can a big format analogue photograph? What resolution does soul have, what resolution does our perception of it have? If facial expressions convey soul, does imperfection of sight reduce the amount of soul being communicated? Why does a piano piece that can move one human deeply leave another completely cold? Why can a landscape, even one devoid of plants and animals, make the soul sing, why does soul get perceived where none was put into? If it's because God created it, how does this not apply to computers as well? So many questions ^^

[bane]

He's making a more fundamental mistake, borne by his lack of emotional range.

He's arguing that every poem cannot have a soul, only during the recitation of a poem, by a live performer, can the work take on the kind of soulful meaning.

Yet this criteria, a human must perform art for it to have a soul, eliminates all non-performance art. Painting, sculpture, etc. all has no soul.

Yet this is obviously not true. A great painting has soul just as much as any other art.

So what happens when you have a poem, crafted as a sculpture? We've already determined that sculptures have a "soul", therefore something like this http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GIchwvJ-aNk/SxMre-2FXnI/AAAAAAAANW... has a soul, but no human performed it. The emotional connection is made via the writer and the sculpture (who may even be the same person). Yet, no human can "perform" this sculpture.

In cases like the OP, the music we have here is no different than a sculpture of the composer's intention. No human performs it, yet it's no less valid than if it was written down for an orchestra of painists to perform.

[john61]

Do you know and understand the painting "This is not a pipe" by Margritte?

[bane]

That painting hangs in pretty much every independent coffee shop and cafe in probably 50 countries.

[john61]

Great, and what does it mean?

[john61]

We are talking about MIDI sequences that are not producible by humans. If no human can produce those sequences, how can they have human soul?

[bane]

Yes it is. The orchestra is the computer.

[john61]

You say that a computer is equivalent to an orchestra?

[bane]

I say that an old washboard and a bucket of nails can be the equivalent of an orchestra. A computer is no different an instrument in a musicians hands than any other instrument.

[john61]

My only possible conclusion of your saying is that you have never heard a good big orchestra.

[bane]

I've played in 2 good big orchestras, 1 nationally ranked. I've even been section lead of one and concert master of an orchestra and a Baroque chamber group. I don't consider myself a great musician, but I definitely know that you've puffed your mind up with so much bullshit you could open a fertilizer plant.