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Comment by Strilanc | Hacker News Reader

Pianos don't have souls, either.

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?

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Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.

That sounds kind of esoteric / superstitious to me. Has this been blind tested? Anyway... computer music has the soul of the people selecting the samples and the parameters for instrument synthesis, and choosing when and how to play them. That's why all that is done manually. Heck, on the C64 (probably not just there) it wasn't unusual for composers to write their own composing software and playback routines.

In the C64 days I programmed my TI99/4A to play Bach. It sounded awful. The interpretation had no soul.

Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.

Is soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply.

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.

No soul, is not imprecision. It is the expression of humans feelings in form of variation of duration, velocity, loudness. For example speed in music is like speed in breathing. You are not breathing with the same speed all the time. It depends on the context. If you are in a hurry you breathe fast and short. If you sigh you breathe deep and slow. An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported. These emotions are unfortunately not sufficiently presentable in MIDI files or music notation. As Mahler said the essence of music is not in the sheet. Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.

> Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.

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.

The problem lies in the context. If we speak to each other we take human context into account. So does a musical interpret. It is just another medium. Music instead of words. A computer does not understand human context. This has already be proven by Weizenbaum with his program Eliza. If the Computer does not understand emotion, he does not understand how to create music. There is no possibility to formalize music exactly, so that a computer can play it accordingly. I doubt that this will ever be possible because a true artist takes human context into account in his performance. So there is no static formalization of music. The only solution would be that the composer plays live on the computer. But an instrument that can not be played by humans is useless in this situation.

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.

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.

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 ^^

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?

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.

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

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

Great, and what does it mean?

You've got to be kidding me. It means it's a painting, not an actual pipe. And by extension, other representational art is not what it represents but something else. But it doesn't matter to you, because the painting is not being performed by a human, and is the same every time you look at it, therefore it, you claim, it doesn't have a soul.

A painting exists to moment it is drawn and it is persistent more or less for at least a few hundred years. Music on the other hand is ordered vibration of air molecules (and this is something different than a composition, hence the pipe example). These vibrations are vanishing immediately. Therefore a painting does not have to be performed like music.

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.

Yes it is. The orchestra is the computer.

You say that a computer is equivalent to an orchestra?

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.

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

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.

If those orchestras sounded like a old washboard and a bucket of nails, than I definitely do not want to attend a concert.

> duration, velocity, loudness

Then harpsichords have no soul and Bach would like to have a word with you.

It is known that Bach improvised about his works during performances. That means he even left the written notes.

A harpsichord pretty much fails your "test" for "instruments with souls".

why?

I told you two comments ago, you also don't have any reading comprehension. Do you know what a harpsichord is and how it works?

Timing is the most important thing in Music according to Mozart. Are you trying to say that a harpsichord does not allow variations of timing?

What about a recording versus a live performance? Isn't a MIDI essentially a super-low-resolution digital recording, minus any spatial acoustic noise? Is soul then contained in space, or the presence of those souls present?

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.)

And all your experience tells us is that the Ti99/4A did not have good sound chips and/or you are not good at writing music for it. Meanwhile, I still listen to certain C64 music regularly that I greatly enjoy, because the composer knew how to extract great music even from something as limited as that.

No, the TI99/4A had no understanding of music. You have to have emotions to understand music. A Computer does not have emotions.

So does that mean that piano music played on an insufficiently fancy piano is soulless as well?

I have a Kawai MP10 digital Piano and an old hand made analog Hofmann piano. If I play for example just the last Chord (6 Notes) of Chopin Prelude op. 28/4 on the Hofmann the music goes deep through every nerve. Nothing comparable happens on the Kawai even with very good speakers.

Are you saying that those 2 data points constitute a spanning set of the possibilities?

Do you understand the concept of a example?

That's what people who buy monster ethernet cables say.

Bad musicians frequently blame the instruments.

You mean good musicians do not distinguish good and bad instruments?

A good musician can play world class music on a rusty spoon, a used pie plate and a one-string-out-of-tune-$20-guitar.

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.

I do not doubt that. But to return to the original point, a good instrument has a soul, as a good musician has. My digital-Kawai does not have one, my analog Hofmann has. My musical skills have nothing to do with that.

The nature of the instrument doesn't dictate its soul. A digital piano was made with just as much care and soul as a regular old piano.

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.

Have you ever played a Bösendorfer Imperial?

Yes. I can do you one better, I've even played the piano discussed here

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/03/international/europe/03RUS...

If you can not understand the difference between these instruments and a for example a Kawai MP10 than any discussion is meaningless.

I've also played wooden spoons, a TB-303, TR-808, TR-909, Classical Violin, Appalachian fiddle, Classical Cello, Classical Piano, Piano Moderne, Three kinds of Organ, Several Synths, Tracker, Marimba, Xylophone, 북, 장고, Kazoo, Slide Whistle, Pot and Pan, 5-gallon drum, Hang, Recorder (modern and classical), flute, penny whistle, Appalachian dulcimer, Hammered Dulcimer, 꽹과리, 자바라, and on and on and on. I'm not even uniquely qualified to comment on this because music is a universe, not a spectrum.

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.

I did not say that I can not perform on a MP10. I regularly do, because of practical reasons. All I said is that the Hofmann or any other hand made piano is much better because it has a soul. Just look in the worlds concert halls and see what word class classical pianists prefer.

Because they require less performance effort to get a nice sound, not because they have a soul.

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.

No chefs use better ingredients because that leads to better tasting food. As music is a communication method of emotions from human to human, a better instrument is one that leverages emotions. Hand made instruments are far better in this regard than robots or computers because the idea of sound of the craftsman, and therefore his soul and emotions, are built in. That is why hand made instruments sounds far more different to each other than modern CNC made pianos. The hand made ones have personality and taste. Important ingredients for good music.

Do you think there is only one (your) reality in the world?

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