Re: Why the music is music and the noise is noise? (eliot handelman )

Subject: Re: Why the music is music and the noise is noise?
From:    eliot handelman  <eliot(at)GENERATION.NET>
Date:    Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:46:55 -0400

Yadong Wang wrote:

> Can we build a system which can turn the noise to the music?

I understand Yadong' question to mean, can we transform noise into
something that attains an identity as music such as it exists in the
world. If on the other hand you can find out how to hear noise as
music then of course Yadong's question is trivial. So here are some
considerations concerning a "conventional" musical apparatus.

A way of thinking about this is to consider the symphonic storm --
where you have representions of thunder and lightning, rain, things
being blown around, and, in Strauss' case, the actual use of a wind
machine. The storm is something like a "noise situation" with a
coherent envelope -- the quiet before the storm, the accelerating
raindrops, the cloudburst, all hell breaks loose, quiets down, etc.
The question is, can you generalize so that any noise situation can be
-- computationally, to boot -- rendered musically? For example, could
you take the sound of shattering windows, or a collision, or a huge
explosive chaos, and turn that into something that is musically
coherent, in the sense of the storm scene?

I believe this can be done. At present, though, this has to be mostly
a work of the imagination, rather than of a system. I have a short
demo up at my site which perhaps can convey a small aspect of this
sort of transformation. I have in fact been attempting to generalize
and render computational, as far as I can, a wide class of "noise"
transforms with which one could build complex and yet musically --
here I need a smiley or something -- "coherent"/"understandable"
objects.

And of course, as I understand from the experts on this list, we don't
have the necessary scene analysis chops to be able to extract the
necessary information from a huge explosive chaos in order to perform
a musical rendering. But all that will be available in the future
without any doubt.

-- eliot

----
Eliot Handelman
eliot(at)generation.net