Call Yourselves Pwaetowian Guards?

Listening to - Spooky - Lush

My mind is a blank. It cannot be MORE of a blank but it is a blank just at the moment. Trying to think of anything without a required external action (such as typing this) seems to result in mental blind alleys without any of the normal passing of interesting things.

I found the tape I made years ago which used a sample of Sylvia Plath reading the last line of Daddy. I am not sure whether I feel that it is just naff or actually quite good. After all the poem itself is written in a repeating nursery rhyme format and the sample simply repeats this line over the drum pattern and the melody. I think it is probably best left on my tape and not made available here. All the things I used to do using the three keyboards, Drum machine, sequencer, two effects boxes and 8-track mixer are now possible on a PC. I keep thinking about buying a program to do this but I am quite happy with the ability to access the available midi instruments from within a program. This seems to me to be the ultimate use of technology applied to music. We think of music as art and that only gifted individuals can excel at it. That is probably the case if you want an emotional content which is the point of most music but it is quite possible to produce catchy melody from automatic processes. After all how much range in the attack, decay and velocity of notes is noticeable by human beings.

My aunt always dismisses my ideas about computer music as technological rubbish but I am sure a computer can record ALL the nuances of keyboard playing so why can it not create them from scratch. Like the line from The Six Million Dollar Man which I am fond of quoting, The existence of a human arm in physical form is proof that a properly constructed artificial version will work. The existence of the human ability to play music is proof that a properly programmed computer will be able to play as well. Some modern-day Luddites may well insist that artificial music will never be as good as human produced versions but I disagree. The bottom line is that technology will one day be able to do everything humans can and do it better, longer, faster etc. This opens up all sorts of issues regarding soul and being which obviously are discussed by better men than me on a website near you.

Robert Brown cannot play an instrument to save his life.