Re: [linux-audio-dev] Re: XAP: a polemic

[David Gerard Matthews]

Tim Goetze wrote:

vanDongen-Gilcher wrote:

rhythmn is always based on one integral periodic 'pulse'. if time is not divisible by this atom, there is no musical time.

Nancarow, Ives, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Boulez, Schaeffer, Henry etc. etc in the classical field

can you point at a specific work? those scores are costly and
hard to get.

Stockhausen: Gruppen, Klavierst�cke I-XI, Zeitma�e, Trans....
Boulez: Le marteau sans ma�tre, Pli selon pli, Piano Sonatas, Sonatine for flute...

those works of boulez and stockhausen i remember seeing the
scores of don't specify a meter at all, and where they do it
was nothing out of the ordinary afair.

Frequently Stockhausen does not specify a meter, and Boulez occasionally.
Certainly both composers have simplified their musical languages somewhat,
which is why most of the scores mentioned above date from the 1950's and
1960's.

you're not talking about absence of notation, right?

Taylor, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Mengelberg, Broetzman, Zorn, Ayler etc etc in jazz/impro

if you mean what i think you do: these guys don't prescribe a
meter in the first place. give a pointer where they do and its
not integral, please.

We're talking about *percieved* meter, not notated meter. Sure, most of
the jazz/improv masters above did not *notate* many of their compositions.
But most computer music isn't notated either, so if all you care about is
notation then a sequencer API is probably not very useful. Perceived rhythm
involved a heierarchichal accentual pattern superimposed upon a temporal
surface. This *is not* necessarily integral! Nor is it necessarily linear;
see Stockhausen's seminal article "Wie die Zeit vergeht".

lots of ambient stuff that I don't know the names of.
lots of acapella vocal music from various cultures.

likewise, but i may be wrong. you don't need a meter to cover
time that is not organized in cycles, right?

Yes, you do, if you're trying to talk to a sequencer.

There can be easily multiple time-frames going happening in a single piece of music that have non-lineair relationships.

we do agree on this afaik.

A computer can also be used to make sounds that a player cannot make.
A sequencer/daw will also be used for non-musical ordering of sounds in time. It might be handy to use an extended beat/measure structure for setting event frames for dialog editing for a radio play.

you're perfectly right in all these cases; but to describe what
is happening then, a musical meter isn't adequate anyway, is it?

Not it's not. But the point here isn't meter in and of itself. The question
is how best to represent the temporal concepts subsumed under the heading
of "meter" and "rhythm" in traditional musical thinking within a sequencer
API.

Anyway my point is that the A/B concept of measure if only really relevant if your dealing with western _notation_, and then together with the entire score.

the A/B concept may not be perfect, but it is able to express
rhythmns from all over the world in integral time units, which
is of great help to musicians and musicians programming computers.

Except when it isn't. 7/20 is a really horrible way of expressing 1.2 beats,
but there isn't any other way to do this in A/B integral notation.
-dgm