Have you ever fucked around with a massively powerful software synthesizer like Pigments or Dune or Serum? Or used a powerful digital fx software like Sandman Pro?

When you have a complex sound generating machine, you can walk around the internals expressing yourself by changing the sound and timbre of the instrument as it plays a note rather than changing the note and the aesthetic dynamics possible far outstrip what seeing music only through the lens of notes can do.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can change the timbre of a note through physical instruments too. No good musician views music only through the lens of notes regardless of what instrument they play. If you prefer electronic music, that's fine. But don't act like its somehow superior to other kinds of music.

[–] dumpsterlid 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

But don’t act like its somehow superior to other kinds of music.

I wasn't, you are putting words in my mouth, I am absolutely aware that good musicians change the timbre of the instrument they are playing to express themselves but those things are usually considered the details, the flourishes, or embellishments of performance, not the core focus of the performance. All you need to do is take a cursory glance at sheet music to understand how most western genres of music perceive the experience and performance of music.

The first people to master this type of music composition and performance were likely didgeridoo players, or maybe it was players of some instrument in Chinese culture that I am unaware of since Chinese history goes back so far... so yah it ain't new.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I mean no, the first people to master timbre were singers, followed by drummers, ~tens~ hundreds of thousands of years ago. Let's not lose our heads here.

[–] dumpsterlid 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Ok sure that is reasonable, I was just trying to provide examples of non-percussive non-voice musical instruments.

Also I lost my head a long long time ago, have you seen it lying around anywhere?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

My apologies if I misunderstood you. I do disagree that such things are considered just small details though. In my experience, those details will make or break the entire performance. No one wants to listen to a live performance of what sounds like a midi track.

I do agree western music notation is very flawed, but creating a kind of notation that properly represents those things is nearly impossible. People have been trying for centuries, but so far the current form of notation is the best we can come up with.

Because of its limitations, musicians very often treat sheet music as a general guide, and deviate from it whenever they feel it is necessary.

[–] banichan 4 points 9 months ago

A synthesizer is an instrument 🤣

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That sounds pretty cool I've been wanting to try and create an idea in my head of a bard playing a lute with thunder as the notes

[–] dumpsterlid 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Do it, the amount of fun you can have with modern software synthesizers and fx is off the wall.

To say it is a rabbit hole with lots of different challenging learning curves is an understatement but at the same time these things are just super powerful toys and surfing through the presets and trying out random sounds alone is immediately fun, you don’t actually need to understand a damn lick of it to have a blast.

With wavetable synthesis or granular synthesis you can take audio samples of thunder and inject them into an audio engine where you can warp and play around with the sound of thunder in ways you can’t even begin to imagine!

With concatenative synthesis you can literally do what you are saying because concatenative synthesis takes one audio file (let’s say a 5 min recording of a thunderstorm), breaks it into chunks and then attempts to recreate a second audio file you give it (a recording of a lute player) by reconstructing the chunks from the first audio file into composite sounds that best approximate the second audio file. This is a much more niche thing but it is realllllllly fucking fun thing to mess around with.