source file: mills2.txt
Date: Sat, 2 Mar 1996 13:17:04 -0800

Subject: Re: More on Simulating Traditional Timbres

From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com>

> An example is my wife commented Gary's 19-TET piece sounding like
> a band of small children playing their cheap recorders (Sorry, Gary).

   No prob.  (By the way, it was 88CET tuning.)  Her comment has been very
useful to setting my future plans.  Brian M. enjoyed that piece (but not some of
my other 88CET compositions), so it seems to be partly a matter of how it's
perceived in context.  

   In particular, it seems to be a good illustration of the risks in undertaking
simulations of acoustic instruments electronically.  People expect pure
perfection or complete abstractness.  Anything between the two is distracting.  

   And it's pretty difficult to attain this kind of perfection.  The cheap
recorders she refered to were almost completely unprocessed digital samples of
real piccolos.  Sampling for this sort of usage is a risky business; it sets you
up against a far higher standard than purely electronic timbres ever had to
tackle.  

   Combining this line of inquiry with Bill's comment, it seems likely that
playing nontraditional tunings on imperfect traditional timbres makes the whole
thing sound like one big mistake to they layman.  They can accept it when one of
the two - tuning or timbre - is nontraditional (or irrelevant in the case of
abstract timbres), but not both.  

   Similarly, the particular piece I'm told that she was refering to was
intended as "fun".  It was intentionally simple in terms of rhythm, form,
instrumentation, counterpoint, duration, meter, tempo, and even harmony (other
than that its pitches come from a nontraditional fragment of the harmonic
series).  Combining that with a reasonably cute melody, how can anybody expect
it to be a profound musical statement?  Yet she and another reviewer thought of
it as a failed attempt at deep musical expression.  I think that that second
reviewer answered that question exactly:  Because real instrument timbres carry
a stigma of profoundness that electronic timbres don't.  

   Perhaps we can all learn from this.  


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