From Andrew Duke Cognition Sent Wed, Dec 23rd 1998, 17:39
From Andrew Duke Cognition Sent Wed, Dec 23rd 1998, 17:39
thought this had been erased in a hard drive crash, but just found it, so thought i'd post it before it really was lost :) here's peter green with some thoughts (peter green and mike dred recently released the Virtual Farmer album on REphlex). hope some find this interesting. andrew PETE GREEN'S MACHINE STATEMENT Machines are a means to an end, they should be transparent to the thought processes we all try to impose upon them. Let us not forget that a piano or oboe is also a machine which can be attributed as simply a mechanistic extension of our own physci and the internal emotional status we each try to transfer to other conscious beings as a representation of our inner self. However, modern (technological) musical composition is now able to transcend certain traditional notions of what a musical work, it's use in society, and it's physical function are. It is now possible to percieve music as the closest way that human kind (in any conventional sense) is capable of achieving any degree of 'telepathic' communication. In modern music there can be very little in the way of distortion formed through translation, because there is no translation. Music retains it's purity because it is a direct language of emotive communication. The obvious and imediate arguement against this is that (listening to) music is of course a subjective process, and any information extracted from a musical source is simply the listeners interpretation of their personal inner self and not that of the composer. However because music has no physical analogy it cannot be quantified in the sense that a painting could because it has no physical presence, and is therefore only identifiable in terms of completely abstracted forms. As we all know music is comprised of descriptions of descrete wavecycles following a harmonic series, with any musical interpretation simply being a modulation of these factors. Music has no form or substance it exists only as 'pure' energy, because of this is it not inherently unstable such as any other communcative device exhibits, and cannot be subjected in the same way with rigourous inacuracies as other forms are subjected to. For example, an abstract painting, although not based on any percievable patttern will always show an underlying discourse apparent from the physical material from which it is based. This in turn leads to certain ways of perceptual intercourse which has nothing to do with the forms from which the artist chose their expressive construction. Music cannot contain these these distortions because it does not contain a physical substrate, it is transparent in transmission and reproduction. Therefore because music does not undergo any ambiguous generic conversion processes ( such as how, for example, a writer would need to convert their perception of a rooms environment into a form capable of being writen down on paper), it can be percieved as the closest thing to a direct linkage to a persons (composers) brain. This has only been a feesable proposition since the introduction of the grammaphone and mass duplication of musical material, since this technology for the first time enabled what the composer wanted to communicate to be reproduced as it was made without the obvious interpretational inacuracies that a manuscipted score would have. In this sense, since music is essentially mechanistic in its function, what the composer heard from the final production of thier finished work as it left the factory could be percieved as a direct 'digital' transfer of all the composer's thought processes that led up to that point in time. More over, since music is a time based medium and is not subject to translational metaphor (such as the telling of a story through film) it can be seen as a direct consolidation of the composers emotive state and thought processes THOUGH TIME over the 5 minutes or so preceeding the moment when the composer said "that's it, that's the final mix". Only todays digital technology is capable of fully duplicating these processes since the quality we hear on a finished CD is essentially identical to what the composer heard.