Most interesting talk with Cat this morning as she strongly disagrees with video because putting your artistic waves into it necessarily means you are not doing that with music and therefore your music will suffer.
The disagreement is that I believe it's all part of the same thing and I haven't expressed it well enough to show that.
There is no intention to stage a written trial and come to a conclusion as to which perspective is appropriate as Cat and I will do that in talking more, ideally after I get a new one online and there's something meaningful to discuss. As it stands, I have not accomplished my objective as the videos have looked like stage shows but have not been specifically transcendental. I need to able to point to something and say, hey, that's what I mean. So we will talk about it some more.
Something that is likely not clear is my view of musical impressionism, something you do if you don't learn how to read music. I do believe it's valid, particularly in the context of sixties guitarists, but whether it's valid anymore is open to opinion. Anyone's kid brother will be technically better on guitar than I but my focus is entirely on whether the music is engaging. Is it touching my heart, spirit. Does it make my booty twitch. What does it do to me, what are the feelings.
One of my earliest dreams was to see music and if it's possible then how would you do it. Drugs, computers, cameras, etc all rolled into this. It may seem as though there was no integration but actually it was total and some of you have heard my more outlandish ideas for presenting a visual idea of music.
Hopefully in brief, sending a MIDI signal from your instrument tells the system what you are playing now but it remembers what you have played previously and it builds the display based on that knowledge. There are various types of visualizers on iTunes and other examples of music software but the images are largely algorithmic as opposed to analytical. For the device to be everything I want, it has to know if you are playing well or if you suck and it is smart enough to know dissonance is valid when the time is right.
(Ed: the software has to be a musician?)
Yah but it won't sleep on your couch.
Cat and I will talk about this more and the important thing is that it's not a debate. If you want to comment, please do.
The disagreement is that I believe it's all part of the same thing and I haven't expressed it well enough to show that.
There is no intention to stage a written trial and come to a conclusion as to which perspective is appropriate as Cat and I will do that in talking more, ideally after I get a new one online and there's something meaningful to discuss. As it stands, I have not accomplished my objective as the videos have looked like stage shows but have not been specifically transcendental. I need to able to point to something and say, hey, that's what I mean. So we will talk about it some more.
Something that is likely not clear is my view of musical impressionism, something you do if you don't learn how to read music. I do believe it's valid, particularly in the context of sixties guitarists, but whether it's valid anymore is open to opinion. Anyone's kid brother will be technically better on guitar than I but my focus is entirely on whether the music is engaging. Is it touching my heart, spirit. Does it make my booty twitch. What does it do to me, what are the feelings.
One of my earliest dreams was to see music and if it's possible then how would you do it. Drugs, computers, cameras, etc all rolled into this. It may seem as though there was no integration but actually it was total and some of you have heard my more outlandish ideas for presenting a visual idea of music.
Hopefully in brief, sending a MIDI signal from your instrument tells the system what you are playing now but it remembers what you have played previously and it builds the display based on that knowledge. There are various types of visualizers on iTunes and other examples of music software but the images are largely algorithmic as opposed to analytical. For the device to be everything I want, it has to know if you are playing well or if you suck and it is smart enough to know dissonance is valid when the time is right.
(Ed: the software has to be a musician?)
Yah but it won't sleep on your couch.
Cat and I will talk about this more and the important thing is that it's not a debate. If you want to comment, please do.
2 comments:
One doesn't necessarily have to exclude the other. On the contrary: music and video can even enhance each other. Still, Cat does seem to have a point here. What does a mere video registration of you playing the guitar with a couple of lasers and a smoke machine add to the experience of the audience? And, given that it'll surely take a lot of time and energy to get the machines doing what you want them to do, one could argue that all this energy might be better put to use for either music or video. Maybe the answer lies in serious post-processing of the raw footage. But that is probably very time-consuming - time you wouldn't be able to spend on creating music.
To cut a long story short: it's damn hard work to do everything by yourself. Even if you only use static camera positions.
It's a fascinating exercise like that. My general thinking is my life is the art and the music is the expression of it ... but so are the lights so long as they convey something more than whizbang amusement and really do convey the story I'm trying to tell.
It is a bitch and an incredible bitch. This computer really should get a medal for putting up with what I did to it as I made it work SO hard. Poor thing needs fans blowing over it all the time so it doesn't melt. So relief comes and that will make the difference in the ability to create 'a reality of surrealism' rather than just some Joe with lasers shooting out of his head.
An important lesson came out of it as Lotho is more crafty about his comments these days and sometimes words them so I don't know it's him. I responded to one the other day thinking it was someone else and thereby managed to offend him enormously and the person I did not care about offending but should have ... probably never saw it.
Therefore, one size fits all. I'm not kidding around with this crazy stuff as concrete reality means nothing to me. Earthquakes come, concrete breaks, maybe ends up under the sea. Everything in that realm is temporary. However, the frequencies and the spiritual vibration of music potentially go on forever and that is what I want to capture. Maybe it's impossible but I've been trying everything that popped into my head for forty years and I won't stop now! I understand, as much as a cabbage head can, the implicit difficulty in observing an electron but ... if it were easy, it wouldn't be a good trick.
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