|
z6 -> RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (Nov. 9 2013 8:34:14)
|
I lied.
This Nyquist thing is interesting and can shed light on something important in the classical technique versus flamenco technique debate (given that it is a non-issue, aggravating, and childish, or maybe that's just me.).
I f I use the theorem to sample classical guitar tones. For example, say we made a list of the techniques Grisha cites. Then we built a virtual guitar (sound bank - not a 'mathematical model' - the gesture would already be imprinted in the sample) from individual samples. I know I could build classical performaces that would 'fool' anyone here into thinking that it was 'real'.
Bubalub, if you're still here. This is the 'investigating reality' part: I could not build a flamenco peformance of even the 'simplest' single chord, one-finger playing using the same database without enormous difficulty.
To capture the flamenco gesture I would have to sample at a much 'higher' level (musical, not in terms of actual sample rate; I would use much higher rates than Nyquist). At the actual level of the labeled technique, in fact. For example, I'd need to sample whole 'musical' phrases at the most granular level. In flamenco, one ends up sampling like a bleedn' DJ, stealing great lumps of music. But single tones, maybe tirando, and apoyando, but tirando would suffice, for Bach. (Apoyando would have guitar listeners asking how the guitarist played apoyando when it was physically impossibe, for example, to play a given phrase.) A library of tirando-only would do for the whole of rennaissance and up to maybe classical, maybe all of it, I don't know.
Bach, for example. Say I get Grisha to sit for five hundred hours while I make libraries of him playing individual notes across a range of velocities (I would need to artificially normalize but we could still have multiple velocity levels for each note.)
Then Grisha could sit and we could program performaces according to his personal interpretation, but digitally.
But one simply cannot do that with flamenco. The gestures are too important. Too 'physically' subtle.
The only approach that could work, at a granular level, would be to model the instrument, rather than the sound, then develop digital gestures (do-able these days?) to emulate or play flamenco.
I believe this is important. It is a real, demonstratable, measurable 'thing'. It is not just opinion or taste. It separates all that stuff from something physical that underlies the gestures that are required.
That is to say; the 'dirt' the jangling noisy stings. They're not just noise. They are fundamentally more complex, at the level where humans might infer music. All of the little sounds and ticks we hear. For example, the lazy i finger I hear in the triplets after the alzapua in Almoraima. To play that one 'only' has to relax, in exactly the right way. Multiply this across all phrases played in flamenco and while the complexity exists fundamentally within each individual note, it is not accessible by defining 'the note' as the fundamental particle of music.
There really is a huge difference. We could sample Grisha. Grisha could 'orchestrate' the playing of Bach in such a way us to make it indistinguishable from that which he might play if, for example, he wanted a 'straight-up' zap through performance of Bach.
Indeed, we would have to program slight fluffs. (Sorry Grisha, in real life you can be perfect but if we digitize you nobody would believe it without 'clues' and red herrings. A sniff here and there in the background. Eazy peezy.)
But flamenco is different. Single notes do not cut it and they are so enmeshed inside other techniques that one cannot use them to create a digital right hand as easily.
It's like this. Jackson Pollock used to claim that every single drip on the canvas was deliberate, planned, created.
Of course, he lied. But flamenco guitar is like Jackson Pollock telling the truth. It is real, fundamental complexity. It is not made up.
I hope this is not offensive. And I get that one might theorize that I am missing some important point or completely on the wrong track and 'justifying this or that.
Segovia was right about these 'styles' being polar opposites, but for all the wrong reasons. He thought it was because he was so evolved and they were bunch of illiterate, greasy nacos.
But they taught him. He took it. He did well for himself. Good for him.
But I can tell the difference between margarine and butter. The state of virtuosity requires the listener to wonder at how easy the musician makes it sound. Doesn't matter what the music is or how bad or good it is. It is the 'ease' that decides.
Music is full of paradoxes.
|
|
|
|
