I wonder what happens when AI can generate a video to match a given soundtrack, as in: AI generate a video that matches this sound file perfectly, showing me playing this music on my digital piano!
Just a (slightly disconcerting) thought ...
CyberGene indeed , it is hard work to reassemble and make it sound as one take . Usually what they do is they assemble different passages with different atmospheres such as intro , 1st theme introduction , 2nd theme etc. It is very difficult on acoustic to proceed otherwise . With midi you can do anything you want , adjust the tempo if needed , and it is a video ? From the moment you have at least 2 cameras , there is no limit to editing . I suspect a lot of videos using midi on YouTube are also accelerated.
David B you know sometimes it is more authentic that way . For the anecdote best recording of Ravel concerto for left hand was a recording from Samson Francois , probably the best Ravel interpreter . There was a few mistakes in the recording but overall it was an exceptional piece of art . The music company wanted to take a second shot but Samson F. refused and said that he preferred to stick with that recording as he felt it was magical and it was more important than some bump notes.
Sadly that is the state of the affair for most recordings, and it has been so for a while.
Joannchr David B you know sometimes it is more authentic that way . For the anecdote best recording of Ravel concerto for left hand was a recording from Samson Francois , probably the best Ravel interpreter . There was a few mistakes in the recording but overall it was an exceptional piece of art . The music company wanted to take a second shot but Samson F. refused and said that he preferred to stick with that recording as he felt it was magical and it was more important than some bump notes.
Oh absolutely. Luckly, there still are live recordings. Music a performing art, and the immediacy of the performance, and the "magic" of the moment is its best IMHO. This is obviously true in jazz, but it was true in "classical" music too, more or less until the rise of the recording devices, when perfection started to become a fixation of the performers. I have some books of that era (*) in which they go at great length on what the performer should be concentrate on, and it's shockingly how different the recommendations are for concerts vs recording.
I like a lot Phil Best's quote that there are no wrong notes and no wrong rhythms, as long as what you play is what you mean (which I guess for lowly amateurs like myself is the crux….)
(*) for example this one
https://www.amazon.com/Piano-Technique-Dover-Books-Music/dp/0486228673
RIP Indeed. I also remember an interview from Herbie Hancock telling a story about a wrong chord he played while accompanying Miles Davis . He said that Miles took the wrong chord as an opportunity to transition to a new key and modal tonality .
Miles also said something around the lines of: any wrong note is only a semitone up or down from the correct note 😀
Thanks for sharing that! Someone else (perhaps it was Stanley Clark, but I'm not 100% sure) once said in an interview something like that:
Some good musicians he played with would be very able to hide the mistakes any other bandmember would do, and that was great. On the other hand, Chick Corea would always take the wrong note someone played as an impromptu nudge to explore something different, and Chick would go on an on playing around that "mistake", often with wonderful results. After the session, Chick often congratulated with the person who made the change, for the musical idea -- sometimes to great laughter of the whole band when recipient of the congratulations admitting it wasn't a musical idea but a mistake 🤣
RIP I like a lot Phil Best's quote that there are no wrong notes and no wrong rhythms, as long as what you play is what you mean (which I guess for lowly amateurs like myself is the crux….)
CyberGene Miles also said something around the lines of: any wrong note is only a semitone up or down from the correct note
That's interesting because I've been working on a particular arrangement for months and it drives me crazy that I cannot do the runs smoothly and cleanly. Perhaps I should just forget about perfection and move on. I can call my mistakes creative interpretation. 😀
God Bless,
David
CyberGene genius quote !
By this logic ... I can play Liszt/La Campanella.
I'll get all the notes wrong, of course.
But that's just creative interpretation. Yay!
MacMacMac By this logic ... I can play Liszt/La Campanella.
I'll get all the notes wrong, of course.
But that's just creative interpretation. Yay!
I think you are overstretching what we are saying here, which I guess is good so we can try to be specific.
The way that I see it, is that music is something coming from inside, sort of like when talking.
One (usually) does not recite a pre-written speech when talking, and I would argue that most of the time reciting a pre-written speech sounds worse than speaking out of one's heart. Obviously that assumes that one is fluent in a language, otherwise reciting a prewritten speech, even without knowing a word of what one is saying is better, but poorly so and perhaps comical (like Stan and Ollie did back in the day: they were not overdubbed, at least not in Italian). Sadly often people are not that much fluent in music and play like Stanlio and Ollio (the names they assumed when broadcasting in Italy) spoke Italian.
So there's a difference between you playing La Campanella like in a pretend-I-am-speaking-Chinese way, and you playing La Campanella hitting some different notes than Liszt intended like if you were making an argument in English and used a few wrong, or different-than-you-prepared words (but hopefully without confounding humility with hubris, right?)
RIP hopefully without confounding humility with hubris
Or if you did confound these two words, perhaps moving the whole discussion in a totally different direction than expected. It happens in language, so why not in music? Only truly fluent musicians can do it, so back to the start…