Brave kids

 

Brian Eno on presets

I think what bothers me, which is exactly part of what you’re saying, is the possibility of not making a mistake at all, of making things that always come with this professional finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like. And I think that’s lethal.

I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” In his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said everything looked amazing at first.

You could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog, and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be, in terms of how it looked.

It meant that what you were thinking about was: How does it work? What do we want it to be like to be in that place? You started asking the important questions again, not: What kind of facing should we have on the building or what color should the stone be?

When I see people fiddling around with synthesizers — this has always been a problem with synthesizers — they always come with a bank of sounds ready-made for people who don’t want to learn how to program them, which, it turns out, is most people.

I remember talking to Yamaha once, which had just produced the most successful synthesizer of all time, which was the DX7. And I said, “You should really make these a little bit easier to program.”

And they said, “Well, we don’t bother because nobody tries to change them anyway. We often get them back for repair, and we can tell if somebody has tried to change the programming, and nobody’s ever done it. They’ve just used the presets.”

That seems, to me, a kind of mental laziness that I really don’t think fits well with making new things.

I am my own worst critic

 

WWED

Been a while since I dipped into Eno

His recent conversation with Stephen Fry about AI is good, but I'm enjoying this discussion even more.

One of the great contributions Brian Eno has made is promoting the 'process' driven techniques within popular music that were a part of 20th Century art movements.

Brian shares a few strategies for changing approaches in the studio and seems to be becoming more relaxed about name-dropping!

Inspiration

Disquiet Junto 0608 Nature-to-Text

 

As someone, I think Brian Eno, once said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” 

When I read the Junto instructions I thought they said to use a text-to-speech tool to turn a field recording into instructions for a composition. 

Anyway, it led me to plan to use lines from my micro-journal with a recent field recording to start a composition. 

After I double-checked the assignment and realised my error, I tried Youtube's auto-subtitles and Macwhisper but couldn't use a speech-to-text tool to turn a field recording into instructions. 

So, I took the instruction to also include considering Eno and his hidden intention is where that recording landed.

Passive-aggressive Oblique Strategies

Eno as Dolly

Brian Eno in the Dolly Parton meme

Oblique Strategies Against Humanity

By Andy R

Eno playing for Peanuts

By poppinuts

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty

Oblique Strategy

Brian Eno by David Bowie

Brian Eno (by Alfred Dunhill)

“…the big mistake is to wait for inspiration. It won’t come looking for you. It’s not so much creating something, I think, it’s noticing when something is starting to happen…”

Brian Eno Visual Music

Been enjoying reading Brian Eno Visual Music by Christopher Scoates. It's a lush book filled with many examples from throughout Eno's education and career, as well as discussing his influences and exhibitions.

The text on the bookmark ribbon comes from the Oblique Strategies developed by Eno and Peter Schmidt, which is a nice touch.

P.S. There's an interview where Eno reflects on the book and his work here.

Theft versus inspiration

Since I am not in the habit of stealing another man’s expertise, I shall ask you in due course to accept remuneration for your most valuable technical aid.

Just reading the excellent blog Dangerous Minds and saw the words above written by Ian Fleming, famous for writing the James Bond novels.

It strikes me as something that some of the professional artists I've had dealings with could learn from. I've been disappointed a couple of times now to have shared information about my practises after an offer of collaboration, only to see my techniques imitated without acknowledgment. I should be clear that I don't expect financial remuneration.

On one hand I know that in the arts if you give two people the same tools you often end up with very different results, but on the other, I know how little trouble it is to recognise when someone has provided inspiration. Which is why I continue to thank people like Alan Lamb and Scott Baker a decade after being introduced to 'the wires', even though the lessons I learned are now being deployed in contexts far removed from a large-scale aeolian harp.

Artists might think it best never to acknowledge the source of ideas as a way to elevate their standing but in doing this I think they miss the opportunity to allow an audience to understand their work or, even better, find their own inspiration. Or even just share the love a little -- it doesn't cost anything.

Very few ideas are original anyway, which is one of the things I like about using remixing as a creative approach. Kirby Ferguson has a bit to say on this.

This issue of appropriation has been on my mind since 2008 but in the last year Brian Eno has given me a healthier perspective on it, which was good as I was getting bitter. His concept of 'scenius' gave me a perspective on my role connecting ideas and artists.

And Eno's description of the differences between artists and musicians, while interviewing Grayson Perry last year, has made me realise I'm much happier working with musicians because collaboration and listening are key to their practises:

BE: I was thinking about the differences between the music and art worlds, and one thing that strikes me is that professional musicians are quite happy to share things with each other – their ideas and techniques, the tricks that made them famous. Is that something more characteristic of music than art?
 
GP: Well, music is more collaborative. In the art world, originality is seen as a precious commodity and it’s increasingly difficult to get because the territory of art is so trampled. I always think that painters are fighting over the last original brushstroke. To find your own voice is incredibly hard. There’s very few people who have a revelatory, original thought; I think they’re almost mythical. Most people start off being someone else and then they make mistakes.

Grayson Perry on the value of art

"...the person who’s getting the most out of any artistic activity is the person who makes it because they’re sort of expressing themselves and enjoying it, and they’re in the zone and you know it’s a nice thing to do."

From the Reith lectures earlier this year, so the hyperlinked quote above goes to a PDF. All four Grayson Perry lectures can be found here.

Recently I was introduced to Perry's work via this great conversation with Brian Eno.

Is the Future of Music Generative?

This is an interesting essay covering a lot of issues surrounding generative music. If you've read a heap of Brian Eno interviews then most of the subject matter is more about whether the music industry would recognise generative music as music but it's a great collection of stimulating ideas.

I've been wondering when there will be a program that registers what the user/s prefer (breaks, ambient, dnb, etc.), what time of the day, what the stress level in their voice says their emotional state would be, etc. and creates bespoke background music according to their previous preferences.

But I guess the real issue is that generative music is yet to become as intricate and accessible as pop music because that is what is marketed to the 'mainstream' as 'music'

Surprising sounds

This is the latest promo from Korg for their synethiser/sequencer program for the Nintendo DS, called DS-10.

I love the fact Korg have turned their attention to the DS but have been underwhelmed by the examples in their videos. To be honest, it reminds me a bit of when I first looked at Reason years ago: beaut interface, crap sounds. (Although I'm told Reason sounds a lot better these days.)

What I am enjoying on my DS is Glitch, a very clever generative sequencer. It lets you modulate five samples and then the program triggers them based on cellular automaton following Conway's Game of Life. So you end up with something that's intuitively adaptable, like through shortening the loop of the game to increase the intensity, and yet surprising in the way of aleatoric compositions.

In short, it's genius IMO.

And, typing of geniuses, it picks up on the work of one of my heroes: Brian Eno. He's been experimenting with generative music since (at least) his 1996 album Generative Music 1.

The works I have made with this system symbolise to me the beginning of a new era of music. Until 100 years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again.

But now there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music it is always different. Like recorded music it is free of time-and-place limitations - you can hear it when and where you want.

I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: "you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?"

More recently Eno has developed generative art in his exhibition titled 77 million paintings.

The aleatory aspect of Eno's music owes a debt to John Cage, whose compositions popularised the role of chance in composition. Cage experimented with different 'instruments', such as tuning radios, in his work and was encouraged as these allowed him to be surprised by a composition - even after he'd heard the work performed many times before.

In Cage's most famous piece 4'33", the composition was entirely left to chance as it called for the musicians to sit quietly for four minutes and 33 seconds. I "heard" this piece performed by Craig Schuftan and was surprised at how your ears seek out noise to fill the emptiness. It trains you to hear music in everyday noise.

This is why generative music seems somewhat contradictory. People create it to listen to in preference to whatever noise is already surrounding them. Brian Eno promoted this idea with his ambient albums that were designed to provide soothing sounds with the expectation of being interrupted. These were inspired by Chopin's piano pieces that were designed to serve as a musical wallpaper. There are now computer applications to serve this purpose, either generating white noise or soft chords in the style of new age music. For example.

In some ways this ambient approach to music is the antithesis of contemporary dance music, which has evolved from Detroit techno's emulation of factories via Kraftwerk and the sampling culture of hiphop. These musical forms take the dynamic sounds and rhythms of machines for new textures. An idea first promoted by the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo in his Art of Noises manifesto, a remarkably potent text.

Anyway, I digress. The thing that appeals to me about generative music is the sense of surprise that allows you to play both composer and audience in a way. I also like the way it keeps me open to hearing music in unlikely places, I figure it's a healthy thing for someone with wide interests in sound.

The thing that occurs to me is that most humans have interests in sound too. Most I've met have a narrower interest, sometimes only a single genre. It's like fetishism I guess and, where a psychologist could put them in a category and recommend treatment, a generative music technology could create a personalised soundtrack. Imagine if my iPod tallied the data about my preferred BPMs along with the times of the day or the quality of light or the level of ambient noise. Imagine if, magpie-like, it were free to choose bits of tracks and add them together in new ways to create a narrative of where I've been based on what I've heard to recreate the experiences and enhance my memories.

Anyway, you might've guessed, my favourite generative technology is the aeolian harp as it also demonstrates the physics of sound. But that's another blog entry :)