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Bowie, genius or not...
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Jul 28, 2010, 12:10
Re: Bowie, genius or not...
Jul 28, 2010, 11:45
"My gut tells me er.., cos we don't actually have interfaces flexible enough to allow the freedom that the medium itself theoretically has. That, in fact, we are 'guided' creatively to produce work following certain work flows."

This is really interesting.

Talking aloud without giving it a huge amount of thought I would say that that even when working with improvised music or live music of any kind that is going to be later worked on in ProTools, or whatever, then you start to feel some subtle differences in how you think about the fruits of your labours once you get to the editing and mixing stage. Compared with analog and working with tape I mean. It has caused a much bigger perceptual leap than say that which was made when we moved from mixing without automation to with.

It strikes me that the graphic representation of the process makes you think more in terms of neatly interchangable musical blocks rather than the ebb and flow of music's "natural" liquid state as a performance in a specific time and space. The archtecture / landscape of a particular moment in time or sequence of moments seems to acquire a rigidity and presents itself as something to be worked with almost in 2D. Which may not be perceptable to the listener after the fact but maybe gets hard wired into the creators' head while they are doing that editing and mixing. In other words we are at times in danger of thinking about music from individual pixel level up rather than the big picture.

If you make your performance and track laying decisions while visually connected to the computer screen I would imagine that this is just exacerbated. Limtless choice within subtly applied tram lines.

On the other hand when you get to mastering stage that visual rendering of the music literally aquires additional dimensions and colours. You start to hear it differently again because you are seeing it differently and your decision making process adapts to that information / representation instead.

So it is maybe not the digitisation that is the issue but the wey the processes are described visually?

I suspect that Bjork probably starts with the big picture firmly in mind and then finds the best way to render that into sound. So presumably the available tools will define so much of the final result but not so much that the imagined work is going to be exponentially different in terms of what it communicates whether she is in a state of the art studio or working with a draw full of kitchen appliances and a cassette recorder. These days not all artists in pop/rock have a vision that way. Perhaps a majority start with a blank screen and a fairly blank mind and simply start to populate both with each "pixel" building block proposing the next from a fairly narrow range of options. Narrow compared with a theoretical creative dream state of entirely free imagining I mean.
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