what's your autodidactic focus in music?

[hivkorn]

art of vibration , do more , do the best , do just like i want.

[jancivil]

I find the dichotomy between 'chord theory' and some notion of free-form quite unnecesssary and false. To be honest the notion presented is just inchoate; it's like having an anti-mathematics position with little to no maths to go by.

Negativland, a lot of it is polemical and spoken and can't be confounded with musicianship hardly at all. I was formed enough to be called 'composer' by the time that came out; I embraced the attitude of it but it would be hard to talk about it in musical terms. Fred Frith or Henry Kaiser, however...

Edgard Varèse in 1954 is far, far ahead of these pretensions afaic, as a trained composer on staff paper. Albeit using tapes of a factory in operation by then, and having exploited Ondes Martenot... The mixtures of regular old instruments, weighing timbres and mixing harmonics as though objective; this uses knowledge. Knowledge is better than ignorance. The oid Map is gone by this point; a new Map formed out of having trod known maps is probably better charted than by the person who has yet to set foot on the terrain.

The vast majority of what I make doesn't "use chord theory" albeit to explain how it doesn't while it won't be from ignorance, and even will be informed by it, and as it is not that in praxis is something I could only impress upon the person that has the language. The position from entirely outside of that is irrelevant.

[telecode]

dunno what chords and rhythms is? some tv show over there?
also, i don't know what it was called over here, but id never heard of "holy f**k" before i saw them on some late night show i accidentally found flicking the channels one night
some years ago now, was still married, but it was around the time of their first album.
and theyre not your run of the mill "band" although there is that aspect, theres also the guy doing the tape and delay manipulations, pretty good stuff, especially live, they can jam on a loop for a while, can get pretty "trancey" in the shamanic sense rather than edm.

They're a good Canadian band. More sort of experimental electronica.

[foosnark]

in the first place, i'd say clearly, the music industry is about impressing the audience, so you want all the stunts you can get, and theory is a *big* part of that i think. (i like honesty, which can't compete with entertainment.)

At some point I realized I just didn't care about impressing anybody, I just wanted to make stuff. It might be art, and I kind of like to think it is.

I make compositional decisions based on curiosity and instinct. I know that often means doing the thing I have been informally trained to do through almost five decades of hearing music. (I'm not old yet...) In terms of honesty, I don't think it would be honest of me either to resist that strongly or to intentionally conform to it.

I've gotten deep into modular synthesis, figured out what kind of music I want to make. It affects how I approach... everything, but especially pitch. Most of the time I don't use MIDI, and I couldn't tell you what the root of the song is -- it was just a frequency I liked. Other things are relative to that... sometimes entirely by ear, sometimes by voltages, harmonics or intervals. Sometimes I will tune two oscillators based entirely on how they sound when FMd by a third, which means they will probably have some kind of harmonic relationship, but off a little bit for some nice slow beating. Sometimes there's not really any pitch center at all. Sometimes there aren't "notes" as such.

Sometimes I don't feel like "melody" matters and I will use random semi-looping sequences from Mutable Instruments Marbles. Other times I'll sequence with a Korg SQ-1 (maybe unquantized) or determine pitches algorithmically with Monome Teletype. Or I'll just let things drone. Or once in a while, get a short MIDI sequence in the DAW looping, and use pitch-to-CV but then use something else for note articulation or levels.

I have a lot of interest in African and Middle Eastern rhythms but don't intentionally use them in my music, other than the most general sense of how pulses tend to be distributed in time. I'm more likely to set up simple algorithms, like:

part A triggers in a 5-in-8 Euclidean rhythm
part B triggers once every 4th "A" trigger, but also measures milliseconds between the previous two triggers and fires another one in half that time

Since I'm doing droney dark ambient stuff generally, the logic doesn't always manifest as some obvious thing that one feels obliged to count out, and I like it better that way.

[vurt]

They're a good Canadian band.

such a rare thing indeed.

[datroof]

They're a good Canadian band.

such a rare thing indeed.

The floppy heads make them naturally good singers. Who knew?

[jancivil]

if the 'music industry is about impressing the audience', it sure offers up some failures to. Some people use spectacle in live shows, 'stunts' but I don't know if it's a feature for pop music per se. Is there no such thing as musically impressive that's not dishonest in this ideology? Rhetorical question btw.

I was considering, looking for ways to make a living at music when I got hurt, and it does mean you put something entertaining on the stage in some way. Unentertaining seems kind of a drag to me. And I've never been dishonest with music. Sometimes I make things more people like, but I have no audience in mind. I had no path to big popularity but there seemed to be ways to make money, which does involve notoriety.

I never thought being isolated and figuring to remain aloof and above it all was through itself more honest than music being entertaining. Even the really 'weird' people I met through cassette trading, well we were trading, sharing, and there was entertainment value, and people liked and were impressed by the material.

[telecode]

They're a good Canadian band.

such a rare thing indeed.

There are quite a few that blow socks off ya.

Godspeed you black emperor from Montreal

[Forgotten]

They're a good Canadian band.

such a rare thing indeed.

There are quite a few that blow socks off ya.

Godspeed you black emperor from Montreal

Their M.O. is usually to gently tickle your socks for a while then build up to blowing your feet off at the same time as your socks

[xoxos]

i don't view entertainment as a good thing, my definition/use is a strict "to hold the attention". impress in the elementary sense as well, not "gee you're fastantic" but leaving a dent. eg. pop music may not give the impression that you're listening to talented composers, but it may succeed at giving the impression that people think about procreation a lot. an atomic bomb leaves an impression, no one asks for autographs. no one has names any more with ol atomic bomb face.

[vurt]

They're a good Canadian band.

such a rare thing indeed.

There are quite a few that blow socks off ya.

Godspeed you black emperor from Montreal

twas but a jest my moose riding friend

gsybe rock
my neighbour likes then less

[donkey tugger]

i don't view entertainment as a good thing, my definition/use is a strict "to hold the attention". impress in the elementary sense as well, not "gee you're fastantic" but leaving a dent. eg. pop music may not give the impression that you're listening to talented composers, but it may succeed at giving the impression that people think about procreation a lot. an atomic bomb leaves an impression, no one asks for autographs. no one has names any more with ol atomic bomb face.

Are you still available to play at weddings?

[vurt]

They're a good Canadian band.

such a rare thing indeed.

There are quite a few that blow socks off ya.

Godspeed you black emperor from Montreal

Their M.O. is usually to gently tickle your socks for a while then build up to blowing your feet off at the same time as your socks

right up to the knees!

[zerocrossing]

art of vibration , do more , do the best , do just like i want.

Be best.

[xoxos]

Are you still available to play at weddings?

weddings, grammarly installs