Interesting Links for 21-11-2011

[andrewducker]

• OWS in an alternate universe
  (tags: occupy watchmen comics funny )
• The co-op business model: share whatever you've got
  (tags: sharing Business advice )
• A very nice visualisation of a Bach cello piece. Click the "?" in the corner for an explanation
  (tags: visualization bach music maths )
• Oddly, Texas can teach the UK a thing or two on criminal justice
  (tags: texas crime rehabilitation )
• Go on tour? How old fashioned! Mariah Carey broadcasts holograms instead.
  (tags: MariahCarey music technology )
• It looks like setting targets for schools and hospitals is actually a good thing
  (tags: measurement targets education healthcare uk politics )
• What happens when you crack an egg 100ft under water?
  (tags: diving scuba eggs video )
• The longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known
  (tags: art forgery usa weird )
• Walking through doorways causes forgetting
  (tags: doors architecture memory psychology )
• Self-Help for Nerds. (Cue numerous disagreeing comments over the definitions of "nerd", "geek" and "dork")
  (tags: geek advice )
• Amazon leaves girl gamers out in the cold. (Message to marketing departments - please _think_)
  (tags: amazon gaming women )
• Brent Spiner on perceptions of Star Trek
  (tags: StarTrek acting BrentSpiner )
• Interesting stuff on The Great Dying, when volcanos nearly wiped out all life on Earth.
  (tags: life earth volcano geology )

Comments

[pigwotflies.livejournal.com]

The Bach thing is both very clever and intensely annoying to listen to for anyone who knows the piece, because the timing and phrasing is just off what a human player would play.

[pigwotflies.livejournal.com]

Or rather, it makes the little variations in timing away from playing the notes exactly as written that give the piece expression _all_ the time, making them annoying.

[andrewducker]

I also noticed that if the app was running a bit slowly then notes could get stretched out of proportion, or the whole piece could sound slowed down.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

What is the 'right; way to play a score? Is a computer too perfect, that every note lasts exactly whatever duration it is programmed to be? At what point does human variability become unacceptably 'sloppy' or imprecise?

[pigwotflies.livejournal.com]

That is the crucial question. And I'm not sure what the answer is. That Bach piece bugged me because it's one I know very well (and have attempted myself) and that version just sounds 'off'. Not in tuning, but the timing. Expressive playing comes from lots of factors - timing, pressure of the bow, tuning, vibrato, phrasing. In the app, the variations in timing in notes don't make sense. I think it's that the same pattern of tiny delays in timing is repeated all the time, which a human player wouldn't do. Any one phrase could sound like that from a human, but when they all do, the effect is artificial and odd. A sort of musical uncanny valley, maybe?

It also sounds wrong to me because the strings are plucked, whereas the piece as written is bowed. It sounds more like it's being played on a harpsichord that a cello.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Perhaps for those more knowledgeable about these things than me:

Could a Markov model be used for a computer musician with an initial seed value to make the variations in duration, pitch etc., variable but also consistent in their variations?

It's a long time since I've used sequencers, but they used to have humanize and quantize functions, the former making the machine more human and the latter making the human more machine like.