As a pianist I do not understand the purpose of music that is not playable by humans.
In my understanding music is a communication method between human souls. A computer has no soul, likewise Black MIDI "music".
"If I hear one more person who comes up to me and complains about "computer music has no soul" then I will go furious, you know. 'Cause of course the computer is just a tool. And if there is no soul in computer music then it's because nobody put it there and that's not the computer's role. It's the role of the songwriter. He puts down his soul in the song if he wants to. A guitar will never write a song and a computer will never write a song. These are just tools." -- Björk
That said, I'm not a fan of those particular songs either; less would be more IMHO. But many of my all time favourite songs are chip tunes... some compositions (!) simply don't need additional "soul" added to them, they work just fine played by a robot.
Maybe I'd understand your complaint if it was about computer composition of music, but this is just using the computer as an instrument. Would you say flute players can't play music "with soul" because they aren't directly whistling the noises? Why not? How is that qualitatively different from using a computer to play your composition?
Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.
For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc.
This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to it. You could tell us which piece you think has more, or any (I'm not sure if soul is quantifiable or just a binary existence) soul.
Here's an idea for a test: start with a song recorded at 44100Hz (standard CD quality) that has soul. We can debate the actual piece of music, but I'll use "Clap Your Hands" by A Tribe Called Quest in this example. Give a bunch of people a randomly-downsampled version of the song (at 12500Hz, 800Hz, 220Hz, etc), and have them answer a simple question: "Does this have soul?"
The song is 93BPM, or 1.55 beats per second. At a sample rate of 1.55Hz, we're looking at one sample per beat. Let's use a standard 16-step sequencer and say that a MIDIfied approximation is going to have four samples per beat (quarter notes). So, at about 6.2Hz, we've got a recording that has no better resolution than MIDI (potentially even worse).
Ultimately, I guess I agree with you: "soul" is in the ear of the beholder.
(Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about digital audio.)
Music that wasn't written on and for a computer, no. Yet it's perfectly possible to manually craft "variation of duration, velocity, loudness" for every single note of every single instrument -- just not by feeding music in standard musical notation into a sequencer unchanged! I agree that MIDI isn't very sophisticated, but it's hardly the last word of music written on and played back by computers. Just consider how young this all is! I'm pretty sure physical instruments and the songs played on them started out kinda simplicistic, too. And tribal music for example often isn't so much about expression emotion, but putting people into a trance-like state by endless repetition, and techno does that just nicely already. It's not my cup of tea generally, but I get the same out of chip tunes: I don't need sophisticated music, I just need a canvas for my ears and soul to draw on, I can fill in the blanks or dream up harmonies on my own.
> An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported.
True, but also
a.) it doesn't stop there. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if a simple "gridlike" composition makes me sad, happy or gives me goosebumps, that's "soul enough" for me. Even the soul of a simpleton is still a soul :)
b.) the computer enables composer and interpret to be the same person.. and if they so desire, they can put endless amounts of detail and emotion into a piece. Personally I have no doubt that people like Mozart would have been all over computers as an instrument, and the wide range of expression they offer already.
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 ^^
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.
Every form of human art has a soul, a painting, or the actually played music. Computer made "art" does not have a soul, although it may have the same physical structure than a human made one.
Then harpsichords have no soul and Bach would like to have a word with you.
Crap musicians are those that rely on fancy instruments to make up for their lack of basic musicianship.
Even a drunk martini bar pianist can sound halfway decent on a $70k Steinway or Bösendorfer.
Even instruments with very limited expressiveness are no less important. Yanni regularly brings listeners to tears and he plays as much on a synth as he does on a traditional piano.
"Soulfulness" didn't stop with the digital revolution. You're simply no sophisticated enough to perceive it. Even instruments like a tb303 have brought deep meaning, and communicated emotional soulful intention, to millions.
Your emotional range is just too narrow to feel it. Blame yourself not the instruments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/03/international/europe/03RUS...
If you can't create beautiful, soulful, music on a Kawai MP10, or even a bag or sand, then I question your authority on music. You rely on expensive instruments as crutches to fill in your musicality, when you need to develop your own. Start with simple instruments and when you can put soul into a pair of wooden spoons then you can move on to more expressive instruments.
Somebody who can't perform with soul on a Kawai MP10, then any discussion is more than meaningless because you've limited soulful musicality to such a tiny fraction of music and instruments in the world that you definition is effectively useless.
Your argument is like saying "chefs use better ingredients in their restaurant then at home because those ingredients have a soul, while the ingredients they use for home cooking does not".
You are utterly divorced from any reality and live in a trite pedantic fantasy world. Please stop talking to me.
You're simultaneously tiring, limited and boring.
Do you think there is only one (your) reality in the world?
Ranging from 8-bit chip tunes to much more complex electronic music.
Why does that affect the level of communication? To me, the only thing that is different vs a song is that for electronic music the communication is mostly from the composer. But I find that to be the case for most instrumental music, including classical music - a performer that adds so much "personality" to the piece that I notice will generally annoy me.
Music notation is only a recipe for making music. Playing the recipe is not making music.
A prush, pencil, and musical instrument that can not be used by humans is therefore useless.
The point of the post you reply to is that art can be created even when it is not possible or meaningful to do it as a live performance. Performers do not have a monopoly on creating art. In fact, sometimes performers are props that are or have been necessary due to the lack of technology.
For electronic compositions rendered directly to a sufficiently precise format (which MIDI is not), you need no separate performance - the act of composing it and performing it is the same.
Since I reject your premise, your conclusion is irrelevant to me, and I don't think there's any chance we will get any further.
I see from other comments that you imbue the touch of a human performer some special quality beyond the qualities purely physical sound generated, and to me that is pure superstition with no basis in reality. You might as well try to convince me fairies are real.
You are assuming that more "soul" (whatever you mean by that) is better. I argue that often it is worse: I tend to dislike classical music where the person playing the music adds too much personal flair (or "soul"), because it makes it sound different to what I expect the piece to sound like. To me that added "soul" detracts from the experience more often than it adds. For that reason too, I organize my classical music solely by composer: If the performing artist is "too noticeable" for me, the piece won't stay in my library, and so I have no interest in who the performer is for the classical albums I keep playing (yes, I can hear the cries in agony from people who considers the performer important).
And electronically generated music is not sheet music. It is more akin to a recording of a performance, even if that "recording" was not live. It embodies what the composer intended the piece to be, rather than being a mix of a recipe from the composer and a musicians interpretation of that recipe. And I am perfectly fine with not having someone else meddling with the composers vision.
(I do listen to a lot of remixes, and that is different in that they are different enough to the originals to be separate works that I can enjoy that separate expression).
Programming a machine to play something back in just the way the composer wanted is the same as performance. The composer get to become the performance artist interpreting and setting their own will, their "soul" as you want to call it, into the machine. So that their music is interpreted and heard exactly as they wished it to be. It's no different than if the composer were to perform their own compositions.
You may not like the instrument being used here, or the way in which the composer has expressed their intent in the recording, but it's exactly as they intended.
Just because I can't humanly play Paganini's Caprices doesn't mean it's bad music.
This "soul to soul communication" you talk of has no meaning to me.
You have a fundamentally broken concept about music.
If you mean "physically capable of being played by a human" then I'd say that a large majority of popular music right now is unplayable by humans, simply due to the sheer amount of digital production that goes into them. Many genres of electronic music fit in this category, but while being "unplayable," all clearly have an author (the composer/producer) and an intent (no matter how shallow or profound).
But if you meant "playable by humans" on a subtler level, I then ask:
Is music coming from a radio playable by humans? Is music written on a sheet playable by humans? Both lack an immediate human operator that is "playing" them, yet despite this difference of media, both are valid forms of music that clearly communicate the intent of a human soul (the former through the radio device, the latter through symbols).
I'd argue that using the computer/algorithm used to generate the black MIDI is an instrument like any other. Maybe you were asking something more along the lines of: how valuable is music that is generated arbitrarily or randomly by a computer algorithm, and does it contain "soul" like music produced explicitly by humans? That is a philosophical question about the nature of art and computational creativity, perhaps without an answer.
C'mon HN, be better than that!
So whether it was made by human hands or a computer algorithm, if it sounds good, people will listen.