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Comment by john61 | Hacker News Reader

A human interpretation of sheet music is a 3 tier soul transformation. Composer - Interpret - Listener. Computer played music has an digital filter that eliminates a lot of soul in between.

Music notation is only a recipe for making music. Playing the recipe is not making music.

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There are plenty of other artistic mediums that lack a performance aspect. Painting, drawing, literature, photography. Do these mediums also lack soul because they directly connect the composer to the audience, without a third party to interpret? Sure, if a piece of music was written with the intent that it be played by human hands, then it probably won't sound great when played by a computer. But if an artist creates an original piece of music using electronic tools, how is listening to that piece any different than viewing a photograph, a painting, or reading a book? Many people dislike audio books specifically BECAUSE the filter of the narrator colors their interpretation of the author's words. As with reading, one might argue that electronic music better communicates the author's soul to the audience.

A computer can not paint like Leonardo Da Vinci. He can not write like Shakespeare. And he can not play music like Sviatlosav Richter.

A prush, pencil, and musical instrument that can not be used by humans is therefore useless.

Your premise and your conclusion is entirely unconnected by any form of logic.

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.

Music does not exist until the moment it is played. Therefore you need the performance to create art out of a composition. Computers can not create art.

I don't agree with your premise. The composition as much art, often more so, than the performance. For most of the music I listen to, including the classical music, I want the performance to be a faithful reproduction of the intention of the composition. For sheet music, you need the performer to interpret, but if he or she interprets outside of well established norms, the piece will sound off.

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.

Do you play an analog instrument?

No, but creating the recipe is making music.

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).

Then you definitely would not like to hear Bach or Mozart themselves playing their own works. It is well known that those improvised on their own works during performances.

You're making the fundamental mistake that all notes that are written down are the same. A midi-file isn't a score, it's a recording of the playback of notes. A performer can sit down at a midi enabled Steinway Grand and record their performance into a midi file, then they can play back that exact performance on the same piano and it will sound identical to the original. If you were to listen to such a playback with your back turned, you would be unable to tell if the pianist was playing, or if the midi was.

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.

The OP mentioned MIDI music that is not playable by humans.

So? It doesn't mean the composer can't write music that exceeds the ability of any human performer and still encode the nuance they intended into the performance.

Just because I can't humanly play Paganini's Caprices doesn't mean it's bad music.

If the composer writes music that is not even playable by himself, then this music is never played by a human. Therefore a soul to soul communication to the listener is impossible.

I challenge John Williams to play the theme to Star Wars on his own! The point bane is trying to make is that the composer can use MIDI to record parts of a performance and then combine it into a form which is then unplayable by a single person [Edit: or any group of people].

I don't even know what a "soul to soul communication" is intended to mean. It sounds like you are applying some mystic qualities to it. I think most of us here don't think that the act of performance itself adds anything to the quality of the sound of the music over and beyond the sounds that are recorded, and so a "recording" that is painstakingly generated note by note is to me no different from one that is played live as long as they sound the same. If a piece has never, ever been played live, it makes no difference to me.

This "soul to soul communication" you talk of has no meaning to me.

99.999% of composers write music they don't and can't play themselves. That's why techniques like this are appealing, because the composer can write the performance at the same time. The written music is the performance. There's no obtuse performer screwing up the composer's will in this scenario.

You have a fundamentally broken concept about music.

Zappa referred to electronic music (of the day) as 'missing the eyebrows'. Its sort of the uncanny valley of electronic music.

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