[cc-community] Net Band "Packet-In" releases CC BY-SA licensed album
Kevin Phillips (home)
tacet at qmpublishing.com
Wed Mar 19 20:01:27 EDT 2008
Firstly, congrats to Drew for the project and I hope it's a resounding
success. I've listened to the tracks and they sound cool, I really like the
first track. I hope to throw in some remixes at some point, it'll be in
future, right when you least expect it (aka when I somehow find a few
evenings spare). :)
Secondly, some chip'ins on Terry's observations......
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry Hancock" <hancock at anansispaceworks.com>
To: <cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 5:44 AM
Subject: Re: [cc-community] Net Band "Packet-In" releases CC BY-SA licensed
album
> Michael David Crawford wrote:
>> However, I would argue that even individual audio tracks that go into a
>> mix aren't really the source code - rather, sheet music is.
>
> Interesting point. I had a discussion on this topic with a potential
> contributor to a project I was working on, and I wasn't satisfied with
> the outcome.
Speaking from experience, sheet music is only a guide. Even when playing in
an orchestra, the sheet music provides the only the framework, the notes.
The emotion and movement is all in the interpretation and performance. To
illustrate this listen to any two recordings of any composers work, recorded
in different countries and with different conductors. A large part of the
interpretation is down to the conductors understanding of the piece. He or
she will have studied it on an academic level, and will strive to reproduce
his or her sense of perfection. Surprising eh? Now listen to the same
piece played back by a computer notation system like Finale or
Sibelius....even with an expensive sound module it sounds soulless and,
well, bloody awful!
I do agree notation provides a useful guide, and where possible it should be
provided in open projects.
> I would argue that the "real" "source code" for a piece of music only
> strictly exists if it can be generated automatically from the source --
> which means that you need a bit more than the sheet music, really, and
> also that live-performed music doesn't really have "source code" in this
> sense.
>
> What I think is really the "source" for synthesized music, would be:
>
> 1) MIDI or other representation of the music notes and instruments
> 2) Instrument patch files
> 3) Tracks for non-MIDI audio
> 4) Project files for mixing of elements 1-3
>
> As I understand it, this is sufficient to programmatically synthesize
> the music. #3 is a bit of compromise, but you definitely need it for
> things like lyrics or sound effects that aren't strictly instruments at
> all. It's also the closest you can get for music that is performed by a
> person and recorded.
Actually, it's possible to capture a very reasonable MIDI recording of even
the most virtuoso performance using appropriate hardware and software.
Assuming a perfect transfer of the MIDI data (which is not always the case
between commercial products and/or open source products) and assuming the
playback resolution and recording resolution are identical (some products
have finer timing resolutions than others - even in this day and age), it
should be possible to reproduce the original performance of keystrokes
verbatim. However, the likelyhood of two musicans owning the same music
hardware is very low (Roland is better than Yamaha....blah), but it's
possible to work around this by only using software synthesis and fine
tuning velocity curves etc.
Notation would not be sufficient to reproduce the original performance, not
unless it was deliberately metronimic.
In order to share and re-produce a project across various platforms you'd
need :
1) A MIDI file (hi-res)
2) Soft-synth patches (making sure they're public domain and/or
re-distributable)
3) Audio tracks (dry)
4) Effect plugins (environment and production effects)
Effect plugins could be LADSPA based. You could possibly build a jack-rack
and save the configuration, then share that too which would facilitate the
transfer of effect settings, hmm.....
In order to share verbatim (guaranteed) :
1) A project file for a specific product with the same specific version or
better (eg. Ardour, Muse, Wired etc)
2) Soft-synth patches (making sure they're public domain and/or
re-distributable)
3) Audio tracks (dry)
4) Effect plugins (environment and production effects)
Your biggest problem is my current nightmare, persuading folks to use a
common set of tools. Musicans are notoriously clingy when it comes to music
kit. They love what they love, that's it.
> One question we were not able to answer, but I'd like to is: can you
> generate "sheet music" from #1. I.e. is there a program I can use to
> construct readable sheet music from a MIDI file? And of course, can you
> do the reverse -- convert a sheet music format to a MIDI automatically?
No.
> I can imagine that this might not be fully roundtrippable. I gather that
> the MIDI file can contain more information than the sheet music, in
> terms of subtle variations in note timing, duration, and amplitude that
> are not fully encoded into sheet music.
You can't even do that with a MIDI file. Most sequencers transcode MIDI
into their own internal format, then back again when you export. This
guarantees differences and sometimes even odd errors in timing, the loss of
automation and sysex data (data specific to a particular piece of hardware
embeded in MIDI).
> I'm not a musician myself, so this is somewhat foreign territory to me.
> I was more interested in what I should consider accepting and/or
> archiving on an open content project. Strictly speaking, we don't have a
> legal "source code requirement" with the By-SA license, but I wanted the
> project to store source code for reasons of both principle and practice.
Take one can, open it......worms :D
It's a noble cause, it's something lots of people have talked about at great
length (myself included) and it probably needs programmers and musicians to
work together and speak to each other an awful lot more.
> Since it seems likely that on a long-running project that musicians,
> artists, and programmers will come and go, it seems like we need to have
> music in a modifiable form -- something that another musician can come
> in, rearrange and adapt, and then use (for example) in another part of
> the project (or for that matter, in a new project).
I agree. But I warn you, musicians are hard work sometimes :) .....they're
quite capable of improvising and rebuilding a piece of music, instrument by
instrument without the need to change their software or use poor-sounding
software synths instead of their favourite Kurzweil keyboard which cost them
$4,000.
> With graphics, I know what I'm doing. We're using a combination of PNG,
> JPG, and SVG files, and probably also .blend files for 3D (though we
> have none yet). This gives enough flexibility that I'm not worried.
Ok, but we need clean and simple. We need three or four elements to work
with, which are workable and seemlessly transferable. Giving me a score or
a low-res MIDI file means I have to add my own dynamics, I'd probably need
to start over, just as you would if you were provided with a 72dpi JPEGs for
a 10 foot poster.
MIDI is from the 80s. It's ok, it works, but there's lots of things
missing. It's like condemning Open Office to use rtf and csv only.
I don't mean to be negative, I'm positive about this, honest :)
Kev
> Cheers,
> Terry
>
> --
> Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
> Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
>
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