spoof music?

originally posted by Kay Bixler:
No.
Beck uses ProTools, not that I like Beck, and his music sounds like, well, like an old Stones record.
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Well, Odelay didn't suck. It kind of defined late 1996. Or maybe it was 1997. And maybe we can at least agree the Sea Change established that Beck can do the quiet mournful slow ballad thing better than the Rolling Stones (not that I disliked Angie because I didn't)?

jb (who one day hopes to catch Eden at the Yugo-races and playing the bass all in the same day and who used to be pretty good dealing with the multiple recurrent wiring problems on his second-hand B&O turntable but fortunately never turned into a hi-fi geek as down that path lies expensive madness)
 
originally posted by Eden Mylunsch:

originally posted by Arnt Egil Nordlien:

The reason behind the use of ProTools has nothing to do with spoof. It is easily available, less expensive, more movable. So people can do home recordings cheaper and more easy.
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Which is often not a good thing, because it's so easy to be "creative" that you don't have to waste time thinking about the sound you're putting down. Factor in mixing on bad monitors and you have music appropriate for background aural wallpaper but not to inspire the artist within us. The gap can be as wide as the difference between 2008 Two-Buck Chuck Shiraz and 2004 Allemand Chaillot. I like the idea of having a recording studio in my Macintosh but the room and the outboard gear are important factors (the terroir of recording?) that don't come into play in a positive way in most home studios.
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Yes I agree. My words were written as a reply to the feeling that home recordings was the kind of most transparent "real" way of recording. Of course, it is not. But as you also know for many the alternative to do cheap home-recordings is to do no recordings. And this may sound strange coming from a sound-engeneer, but most often the best possible sound is not the most important thing.
 
Endless fertile ground for discussion here...

The most spoofulated phenomenon in music recording is surely the current penchant for ridiculous levels of compression, which makes the music sound simultaneously deafening and monotonous, as all the natural dynamics of the recording are ironed out, and the resultant narrow band of dynamic range is jacked up for "impact."

This is a fascinating and well-argued piece on compression.

The parallels with the production of wine are obvious...
 
originally posted by Clarke B.:
Endless fertile ground for discussion here...

The most spoofulated phenomenon in music recording is surely the current penchant for ridiculous levels of compression, which makes the music sound simultaneously deafening and monotonous, as all the natural dynamics of the recording are ironed out, and the resultant narrow band of dynamic range is jacked up for "impact."

This is a fascinating and well-argued piece on compression.

The parallels with the production of wine are obvious...
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True. The levels of compression the last 20 years have moved from very high to insane. It's like the thought that the higher the alcohol is, the better the wine is. So you have to make higher and higher levels all the time. It is like a neurotic spiral that seems to have no end.
 
originally posted by Clarke B.:
This is a fascinating and well-argued piece on compression.

The parallels with the production of wine are obvious...
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Great article. Thanks.

I don't listen to new rock anymore. So I still have problems with mis-matched recording levels when I slap 5 disks into the player, or sit next to the stereo and gain-ride favorite tracks. But I guess that's better than boring music.
 
originally posted by Dan Donahue:
Eden, I'm not sure who you are (the in-jokes here and at WT just confuse me and give me headaches), but I sure would like to talk music with you over a good bottle of wine sometime.
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Dan, I'm not sure who you are, but you want to take care about coming on to Mrs. Mylunsch, especially in a public forum where she has friends. Also remember what Maria Callas said in her master class: "Can you hear me in the back? Well, if not then listen harder."

It's not so much what ends up in the ear as what the ear picks out. I prefer to listen to live performance, unamplified mostly. But sometimes a radio broadcast from a station at the bottom of the dial, with a couple too many hills in the way of the transmitter, can bring you right in to the concert hall. Likewise pretty much anything in between, I suppose.
 
I was listening to the re-release of Revolver last night & it made me wonder what The Beatles would have done with Pro Tools. I suspect Lennon might have used the packaging to beat the crap out of McCartney.
 
The problem with this discussion is the old problem with analogies between wine and art. Central to the definition of an artwork is that it is artificed, a creation of human intervention (in the minimal examples--displayed driftwood--the intervention is the selection and display; for various reasons Duchamp readymades aren't this minimal). Although wine needs human intervention to occur, what it is and does doesn't rest on how the intervention occurs in the same way and it is not incoherent to want to reduce that intervention to minimums and to imagine a state in which one could have none of it. In art it is incoherent to imagine that since the intervention is the art.

This has no consequences for particular artistic decisions except to note that any decision could lead to either good or bad art and some decision will be what the art is. Some music might be better for less studio manipulation. Some music is made by studio manipulation. Some music would be better off without it. Askesis is a valuable concept sometimes for some art. Decadent overstatement can also produce good art. A vast controlling claim for how to make good vs. bad music or some other form of art in terms of the use of avoidance of technology will always be wrong.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
There are good analogies to be made between wine and music but the limit to the analogy is that the purpose of music is to serve the artistic intent of the composer and musician, while the purpose of (good) wine isn't to serve the artistic intent of the winemaker.
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Not so sure about that. I think quite a bit of wine is produced to serve the "artistic" intent of the winemaker or owner, and a significant number of wine enthusiasts like it that way. Conversely, a lot of music is produced to deliver a consistent "product" to a perceived market segment.

Roger Waters makes a comment to the effect of, what difference does it make whether I make a sound with a Les Paul guitar or a water tap, if it's the sound I want?
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Does it make a difference if the color comes from grapeskins or Megapurple? If the oak flavor comes from chips or barrels? If the alcohol level is arrived at naturally or by R.O.?

I haven't made up my mind on this one, just stirring the pot. I too found myself musing about spoofulation the other day, while reading about drum machines and some software that corrects the singer's pitch in real time.
 
As I posted elsewhere recently (I feel glamorously like Florida Jim!):

My take on natural wine is that a bunch of my favorite wines turn out to be made that way. The more fiddled, tuned, adjusted wines often miss the mark. Some restraint in technique seems to be pretty helpful for good wine. Other things matter as well, its true. But the chefs who poke too much at the souffle dont deliver the goods.
 
Abuse of tools, either to mask flaws or enhance weak material is spoof, right? Capturing and maintaining the connection to our humanity and what is unique and special on this earth is the goal. It's straying from
those goals with selfish or knowing deceitfulness that defines spoof. In other words, spoof is
from inside, the tools just enable those willing to go that route.
 
Just to stretch the point a little:

If Pro Tools is spoof then what is 64-track recording where every bell and whistle is on its own track & can be revised/reworked ad infinitum? Is the only "natural" (recorded) music a live to the final tape performance with no further processing?

I say this as an unabashed fan of live albums, especially those where at least some of the warts have been left in (e.g. Horowitz's comeback concert in the '60s).
 
originally posted by Ned Hoey:
Abuse of tools, either to mask flaws or enhance weak material is spoof, right? Capturing and maintaining the connection to our humanity and what is unique and special on this earth is the goal. It's straying from
those goals with selfish or knowing deceitfulness that defines spoof. In other words, spoof is
from inside, the tools just enable those willing to go that route.
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That is why, whenever I feel inclined to comment on spoofiness or the lack thereof, I come back to the fundamental question: What would Joe Strummer do?
 
If Pro Tools is spoof then what is 64-track recording where every bell and whistle is on its own track & can be revised/reworked ad infinitum? Is the only "natural" (recorded) music a live to the final tape performance with no further processing?
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Ah, the Brian Loring/Adam Lee argument: nothing is spoof, because otherwise everything is. Reductio ad zinotnoirum.

No one (to my knowledge) has ever defined "natural" wine as being made from grapes that have fallen on the ground, self-fermented, and somehow found their way into canisters. There are base conditions for making saleable wine. After that it's all choices and a battle of definitions (that is to say, the choices that some would call "making the best wine they can" are what others would call "deformation" or even "spoof," and there's no way to prove that either is right or wrong).

But it seems to me that if there's any sort of boundary to the realm of spoof, it's somewhere near where the techniques/technology become unquestionably corrective in intent. For example, letting the grapes hang until the acid is insufficient, then adding acid later. Letting them hang until the alcohol is impossibly imbalanced, then adjusting that. Picking grapes so early they're pure greenness and acidity, then chaptalizing and de-acidifying. Enzyming or adding flavorants for "sauvignon blanc" character that one wasn't willing or able to coax from the grape. This doesn't represent my attempt at a definition, but it's a suggestion that if there's such a thing as spoof, actual deformation is likely to be the threshold.

So in music, recording instruments to 1 or 128 tracks doesn't bring spoof into it. Adjusting levels isn't spoof, because it's merely a more efficient way (utilizing a producer and the capabilities of a board and its attendant software) to do what the musicians could do given enough time and attention, neither of which is always sensible or possible in a studio environment. Auto-tuning to allow someone who can't actually sing in tune to sing in tune? Spoof. Having the same writing/producing team work to make twelve entirely different artists sound exactly the same? Spoof.
 
No, no and no. There is good art and bad art no doubt. Spoofed art is a redundancy. Art is spoof. Or in fancier language, it is mere appearance presenting itself to you as mere appearance for the sake of that appearance. The difference between a novel and history is that a novel spoofs up the events it narrates. The difference between music and noise is that music spoofs up sounds according to arbitrary relationships and so on and so forth.

Wine is something else.
 
What about tarted up art?

Not sure, actually, I can fall in line with your thoughts.

Let's get talking intentionality!

Let's get all syllogistic and compare Damien Hirst to Harlan!

Gauntlet's in the air, but it looks to be heading groundwards.

Nb. I have read no other post in this thread but Jonathan's. FWIW YMMV WFT FOS GMO.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
What about tarted up art?

Not sure, actually, I can fall in line with your thoughts.

Let's get talking intentionality!

Let's get all syllogistic and compare Damien Hirst to Harlan!

Gauntlet's in the air, but it looks to be heading groundwards.

Nb. I have read no other post in this thread but Jonathan's. FWIW YMMV WFT FOS GMO.
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"Tarted up" makes sense as a judgment about an artwork that say has more ornamentation than its form or its embodiment or its significance (choose your poison) merits. It doesn't make sense as a judgment about some form of tarting up that art as art can't do.

There are two forms of intentionality but at the moment I don't see how they apply. One is what might be called the intentionality of an artwork as artwork. In other words, just as one can say about chairs that they are things made to be sat on (regardless of what a particular carpenter might have thought he or she was doing in addition to that when making the chair)and that would be their intentionality, if we could say that art could be defined in a like way--say that artworks are made to be beautiful--then that would be their intentionality, regardless of any other intentions of the artist. Just as for the thing the carpenter makes to be a chair, the chair would have to fulfill the end of being something you can sit on, to be an artwork, the artwork would have to fulfill the end of being beautiful (if that is what the end of art is; I'm just stipulating here, not claiming).

The second form is something like the meaning intention of artists. This applies more to literary works because in order for marks or sounds to be language, the emitter has to intend them to be so taken and literature is comprised of language. It's not clear that paintings have to have the same kinds of meanings, though some of them do, and thus the same kinds of intentions behind them. In any case, this is an intention about the meaning of sentences or signs, even an intention about the meaning of a literary work. Although this kind of meaningis part of its being as an artwork, it's not identifiable with it.

As far as I can tell, both these forms of intention don't change that art is spoof.

I can't sufficiently construe the intention behind the next sentence well enough to respond.
 
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