Girl Talk

[Jeremy]

The process is quite different. You're talking as if process is
meaningless. Process is meaningful. It's meaningful in a particular
way to the musician who is experiencing what it means to make music
with one's body, and it's also meaningful to the listeners. The
semiotics of listening to a stereo and listening to a musician are
completely different.

And there's also the basic, physical, fidelity issue. Even the best
concert speakers you'll ever find will not accurately or precicely
reproduce the sound and tactile experience of an instrument being
played right in front of you.

You keep talking about how the results are the same, whether played on
a CD or by a live band. But the results are much more nuanced than
simply comparing what the waveform of the sound is like as measured by
a microphone.

As for nothing original happening because it will all by hybridization
from here on out, it's always been hybridization. The Beatles were a
hybrid of American Rock and British songwriting. American Rock was a
hybrid of blues with the influence of the trap set, which was
developed for jazz. Jazz was a hybrid of... well we can go on and on
here. But saying that there's nothing truly new because it's all
hybrid now is meaningless. It's always a hybrid.

At any rate, Ableton is a spiffy little computer program. It's a very
simplified sequencer. And yes, one can theoretically play it live.
However, shuffling around a few sequences while on a stage and spazing
out is not the same thing as an orchestra performing, and drawing some
kind of equivalency between the two is just goofy.

I speak as someone who has real respect for the great turntablists.
But Ableton Live? Face it. That's kid's stuff. Comparing Ableton Live
to a real instrument is like comparing a child's play-doh sculpture to
The Statue Of Liberty. Sure, both are technically art, but of such
different degrees that trying to compare the two is just silly.

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:26 PM,  <manny at garfieldartworks.com> wrote:
>> You're comparing putting a CD into a CD player and training for two
>> decades on an instrument.
>
> That's right, I definitely *am* comparing the two.
> The advancement in technology allows you to put a CD into a CD player to
> play other people's music, whereas in the 18 century you had to hire an
> orchestra. The result is the same, regardless of the training time or
> preparation. The result, not the means or the process.
>
>> I compose music with computers. I put CDs into CD players. I perform
>> on instruments. They're not the same thing. They're only loosely
>> comparable in that the end product is some sound.
>
> No, the process and the means are not the same, but I wasn't addressing that.
> I'm talking about a specific end result, which is the performance of
> non-original music.
> In both cases, it applies, regardless of the means. It's either original,
> or it isn't, by definition.
> You playing "Axel F" on your keyboard is the same as Manfred Honeck
> conducting Beethoven
> as far as the originality of the result is concerned.
>
> However, the thing about postmodernist tendencies is that with techniques
> such as sampling (going back to Dadaism, Gysin's cutups, musique concrete,
> etc), and with the whole cultural shrug that almost everything's been done
> or tried already (kind of the musical version of Nakayama's "End of
> History" spiel), the boundary between what is your creativity and what is
> someone else's creativity breaks down. This doesn't have to be treated at
> length here - Negativland and Josh Oswald dealt with it, as did I'm sure
> many term papers and dissertations in the '80s. In the 21st century, no
> more musical originality will emerge from Western culture (have you heard
> anything original from Generation Y? I haven't!) unless a new technology
> that produces new, unheard sounds is invented (like say, the ability to
> make people hear subsonics or supersonics with the aid of in-ear nanobots,
> or something crazy like that). otherwise, all creativity will flow from
> hybridization of the West with other cultures whose music still sounds new
> to us. This is happening now.
>
> But anyway, what Girl Talk does is compose music on computers, and then
> play music on computers using a program that allows for live performance
> (Ableton Live). He doesn't just push a play button as if it were a CD
> player. Therefore he is not a DJ.
>
> And the reason I drew the analogy between the DJ and the orchestra was to
> draw you into the heat of the argument, to get you to realize that when
> you are performing live in your band, you are doing the exact same thing
> that Girl Talk is doing, which is performing your original music in real
> time. Only the process is different.
>
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