[sdiy] composing with c++

[Richard Wentk]

At 16:00 17/06/2003 +0100, Neil Johnson wrote:

> > If you want a sax sound, hire a sax player, if you want a piano, buy a
> > piano..
>
>My favourite quote for JJ Jeczalik (Art of Noise):
>
>"What you mustn't do is pretend that ten tons of concrete falling out of
>  a building is a good tune, because it isn't." -- JJ Jeczalik.

JJ. Yes. There's man who's been sadly underestimated by history.

Another top quote:

When asked by a synth geek journo what kind of desks he liked, he said 
'Brown ones.'

>The essence is often lost on many people, especially when shopping for a
>new synth..."what does its piano sound like?"  Just because it can make a
>sound roughly like a piano (which is actually bloody hard to do, even with
>physical modelling) doesn't mean it *should* make a sound like a piano.

The point I was trying to make was that a lot of people (designers 
included) are very confused about what synths are actually for. People 
absolutely did believe you could make any kind of noise with them, and that 
making any kind of noise was what synths were for.

It wasn't till the dance thing happened that people started to see that a 
synthesizer, especially an analogue one, is just a different kind of 
musical instrument with a certain sound, and not a do-it-all box capable of 
anything.

This all sounds hugely quaint but it's still going on today. From a sonic 
point of view a lot of (say) Csound is a steaming pile of hippo dung 
because many of the opcodes are based on very poor, oversimplified models 
of what happens in real sounds and processes. It's true you can create a 
shelving EQ with a few lines of DSP code copied out of a book written in 
the 1960s. What that won't give you is a *really sweet* EQ. Once you start 
looking into what it is that makes one EQ sound really sweet and another 
sound like a bad transistor radio having a depressive episode, it's easy to 
see that a decent model needs an order of magnitude or two of extra 
complexity beyond the detail a text-book example will give you.

I suppose what I'm really saying is that everyone in the business seems to 
underestimate the complexity involved in creating and playing acoustic 
sounds. They were doing it then and I think it's still going on today. One 
of the reasons people like analogue is because a lot of that complexity is 
designed in as part of the technology, and if you're half-way sensible 
about your designs it will just happen.

I suspect it's actual possible to quantify and measure the amount of 
information and interest contained in a musical sound. It would be an 
interesting exercise to try this...

Richard