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| quote: | | did you know that water was used by the chinese as a way to torture people? yet a lot of people would call water a necessity for life even though it was used as a torture device. |
lol of course - that's exactly my point as well
Psy-T - I agree with most everything you write - you seem to have a far deeper understanding of these things than most. I don't think anybody doubts that, especially after two pages of chain posts lol.
I just don't understand the hostility that I have seemingly invited through this topic.... can we not just talk about the future? if you think everything I wrote is bunk or old news, that's fine, thanks for showing me that, but since I do have a genuine interest here:
what do you see in all of this? anything? it seems you have a great degree of interest in the relationship of humans to their tools and also aesthetics versus methods as well...
a couple things you wrote I felt were a bit indeterminate -
"worth hearing"
who is the judge of what is worth hearing? (i'm not asking this rhetorically) is it a social thing? can something be 'worth' producing even if most people don't want to hear it? what determines musical importance? doesn't it come with time? what if the experiments are a necessary step to something that IS 'worth hearing'
"i most often view art as entertainment, i believe most people do the same"
true, a lot of art is viewed and produced as entertaining. but at the same time there are is a lot that isn't only entertainment - religious art and music, for example - it has cultural value, associated ritual, political message even....some art is deeper than entertainment. take arcimboldo, the 16th century court painter for example. he painted these absurd portraits of nobility basically as compositions of things like fish, vegetables, fruits, etc. one may see this as entertaining (which the nobility did), because it was a novelty and kind of humorous, but at the same time he was basically rebelling against the traditional, conservative ideas of what a court portrait should be, even using it to satire the art and poke fun at the nobles for whom he worked. also back to my example about slim shady - that is music used to torture people. what if the government actually commissioned enimem to make an album that was used for miliary purposes? 
also i have to be cynical - is the purpose of music to entertain? or is it to sell? or is that the same thing? so another way of looking at it is - is it really the consumer in control? or can the producers create their consumers gradually? i think it's probably somewhere in between, in which case music would be more than entertainment. think about all the canned music produced to sell/brand products and corporate environments! actually this is something I am supremely interested in - right now I am working on a project for an office building in chelsea which integrates basically a set highly corporatized nightclubs/lounges/bars and art galleries as well - basically trying to make a proposal about a new corporate environment in which office and entertainment are no longer always separate. this is sort of a trend you see with new-school corporate environments like google. anyways, i am interested in the line between entertainment and function.
when i wrote this post originally i sort of was imagining the parametric stuff (yes i do like that word ) being used mostly in this way, by companies, for basically a responsive form of 'sonic imaging' (that's the phrase Muzak corporation uses lol) music to make people buy things, music that makes people eat more at restaurants, music that makes people lose weight, music that prevents sedition, music that makes babies 
i'm going to bring up john cage - 4'33" again - i suppose this is entertaining (at least to me). it's definitely a spectacle, an event, which is a definite form of entertainment. but my question is - was it made because cage wanted to get a chuckle out of it, or because he was interested in subverting the idea of "music"?
i agree that the 'revolution' against discrete music came from the Dj. actually i'm sure there have been many instances throughout history where this has happened. I'm thinking about things like tribal drumming
i see that my statement about swapping samples/patches was very generalized and naive. certainly this is not always the case. i wasn't saying minimal techno was cutting edge. it's been around for some time, i am quite aware. i was just as much saying that the anthem was cutting edge. i suppose it is, after all, whatever one may think about it.
I just feel that the way most people talk about music is always like "it has bleepy sounds" or "it's glitchy" or "it sounds empty" or "it has a fat saw" rather than "there are two rhythms out of phase in this section" or "the timbre mutates in 32 bar loops" . maybe there's not a real difference, but i think a lot of the way people conceive of music today is very superficial, like, if it has a twangy guitar and voice it's country, and if it has a fat detuned saw bass it's electrohouse, and it it bleeps and glitches it's holden style minimal, etc etc.
maybe that's how it is and i should just accept it? there is certainly a lot of stuff to do in terms of manipulating genre.
but part of me, and that's the part that made me start this thread, asks the question, will music every be thought of more in terms of the processes used to make it (as everyone and their grandmother becomes a producer)? or will it always be an aesthetic thing, a stylistic thing?
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