Expressiveness (was Software vs. Hardware)

[Tony Scharf]

To go back in the conversation a bit...these are my thoughts on
quantifying expressiveness.

while I would agree it is difficult to rate the relative
expressiveness of two or more instruments, it is possible to identify
dimensions of expression as they would relate to the elements of a
musical sound (pitch, amplitude, tonality, etc).  You could also gauge
how the relative interfaces allow for access to those dimensions of
expression.

If we go back to the example of the violin (and forgive me here,
because I have never played one) you see that, while it has few points
of physical contact as James pointed out, it has very direct dynamic
control of the various parts of the sound.  More so than a Piano,
which basically doesnt give you real time modulation capability (or at
least, very little via the 3 pedals).   In a piano, the sound
generation is kept safely inside a box where the performer cant mess
with it (at least not directly)

The synthesizer attempts to give the piano interface access to
continuous sound control via wheels, sliders, knobs and whatever else
they can squeeze into it. Unfortunately, it does so at the expense of
taking your hands off the primary interface and pushing us to take our
5 fingers, and limit them to one or two parameters.  Also, with the
current subtractive synthesis model, the parameters of a synthesizer
can be very very many, but also very disconnected (FM synthesis is an
exception - one of the reasons I love it so much) meaning you can mess
with one parameter and its not going to have a huge impact on all the
others.

So a synth gives you all of that access to the sound that a piano
doesnt, and potentially even more than a Violin (or any instrument I
dare say).  That said, you also get one thing that I think is the key
to why keyboards are (by some) considered less expressive: you have
the *choice* to interact with the performance parameters or not. On a
violin, because your hands are always right on the few physical points
of interface it has riding them.   This is really true of any
traditional instrument.  If I decide on a cello that I am not going to
put my hands on the strings....its going to be a very quiet
performance.

So I think what you end up with is that basic human laziness is what
leads to synth performances sounding so flat compared to other
traditional instruments.  Does that make them less expressive?  I dont
think so. It just makes them less likely to be used for expression,
and more for playing back loops..

Tony



On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Andy Tarpinian <evildead at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 1, 2008, at 10:22 AM, James R. Coplin wrote:
>>  With the constant push for the new in electronic music, I think most
>> miss out and don't stop to think that perhaps they need to develop a
>> relationship with an instrument instead of just getting a new shiny
>> every
>> post NAMM season. This puts many into an endless cycle of searching
>> for that
>
> except for a select few, companies don't introduce instruments at NAMM
> anymore, just computers.
>
> _______________________________________________
> music-bar mailing list
> music-bar at lists.music-bar.org
> http://lists.music-bar.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/music-bar
>