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by georgebonnr
4151 days ago
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Makes for an impressive read... perhaps too impressive. Reeks of curve-fitting to me.
"For instance, if I heard something—a melody, a chord progression—that had an emotional attraction for me, I would draw attention to it in the mix, repeating it and developing it further if necessary."
Sounds like a dressed-up version of n monkeys at n typewriters. Let them go, and when you finally see something that's identifiable to you as a word – "dog", tell them to type that more often. So every 20th word is "dog", with pseudo-randomness continuing underneath.
We would never enjoy reading a short story consisting of this, but because repetition is one of the most important foundations of music listening (http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/why-we-love-repetition-in-mu...), this works. To me, while the project seemed interesting to work on, and most people would call the music beautiful, it doesn't really amount to what it's purported to represent. Another (to me) important point: a lot of the compositions, with some notable exceptions, don't stray far from the pentatonic scale – or the individual elements are pentatonic in relation to themselves. The pentatonic scale is 5 notes that, to western audiences, always sound relatively pleasing in relation to the other 4. You could play something literally completely random in a pentatonic scale (perhaps with certain broad rhythmic restrictions), and western audiences would enjoy it.
If anything, I think this is just evidence that the process was actually carefully shaped at every step of the way by human tastes and intuition. The computer was truly more of a servant than a collaborator. |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpvfSOP2slk
A good way to find new ideas for music that people will care about listening to is to go back to the pentatonic system, and find new variations to take from there.