The Unintentional Empowerment of the Composer, Part 3
February 17, 2009The time gap between entries here is making this start to look even less like a blog than it did already. In fact, some have pointed out (quite correctly) that this is less a blog than a collection of essays that is added to sporadically. And it still doesn't have syndication.
Sigh.
Oh Well.
In any case, when I wrote part 2 of this series last year, I promised that we would get to the 'fun stuff'. That is, a discussion of the music-making resources that composers have access to if they have a computer.
(I do hope that no one interprets the word 'fun' literally, here. Because anyone who does is certain to be disappointed by what is to follow.)
Probably the best place to begin is the working environment, or DAW. DAW is an acronym of Digital Audio Workstation, which is a fairly good description of what it is. There are many kinds of DAW, so it is hard to give a blanket description of them, but most of them allow one:
- to record, edit and process audio tracks
- to play, write parts for, and record software instruments using MIDI
- to mix audio tracks and MIDI tracks together to create a finished musical work
This might be a small list, but it describes an endless universe of creative possibilities. It also describes processes that would have been impossible or absurdly expensive as little as 15 years ago.
The recording and processing of audio alone used to involve gear that cost a great deal of money and required technical skill and patience to operate and maintain. A magnetic tape recorder that can record 16 to 24 tracks of high quality audio costs a small fortune (a very used one is going for 9,000 dollars at Vintage King as of the writing). The reels of tape alone cost 250-300 dollars apiece. All of the methods of processing this audio cost a great deal of money as well, from the console to the outboard compressors, equalizers, enhancers, reverbs, delays and so on. Software instruments, on the other hand, didn't even exist 15 years ago.
Today, one can find an application that can record, edit and process up to 16 tracks of cd quality audio for precisely zero dollars. One can also find free applications that allow various numbers of MIDI tracks that can control all sorts of software instruments. And there are numerous applications for between 40 dollars and 80 dollars that can record unlimited tracks of audio at whatever bit rate you want, while allowing unlimited MIDI tracks controlling a vast array of musical instruments.
Needless to say, there are also numerous applications that are considerably more expensive than these that have more or less the same functionality. The additional features that these applications offer may or may not be important to some composers, but they certainly aren't necessary to make good music.
But a DAW application is much more than a mere substitute for a studio full of hardware. For it places all of these resources at a composers disposal in a much more intuitive manner than any hardware studio.
Of course, 'intuitive' is a quality that is unique for each person. But for the past 300 hundred years or so, composers have thought of musical design in terms of a score, which is a visual representation of music in which the time element is represented by gradations on an axis that is read from left to right, and the pitch element is represented by gradations on axes that go up or down, as in this simple bit of piano music:
This type of visual orientation is deeply ingrained in the minds of most composers. Happily, this two axis perspective forms the basic orientation for most DAW applications, or rather, the basic orientation for at least part of their workspaces. In fact, as noted in part 2, some applications have score editors, allowing one to work with MIDI data in the familiar standard notation. But most applications use (in addition to other, less popular methods) a piano roll editor, which has the same basic function and orientation.
This is a shot of the piano roll editor of Propellerhead's popular Reason software:
And this is a shot of the piano roll editor of a free application called MULAB:
As you can see, they work pretty much the same way, with a piano keyboard providing the vertical gradations, and a time line with bar, beat, and smaller subdivisions providing the horizontal gradations.
The nature of the piano roll makes it difficult to work with more than one track at a time, which is why most applications make it easy to toggle between the piano roll editor and a track view (MULAB):
In track view, the similarity to a traditional score is striking, as can be seen by comparing the same MIDI file (an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker) in an application that uses a score view (Myriad Software's Melody Assistant) and one with a track view (Mackie's Tracktion):
To be able to compose in this fashion is a profound luxury. To be able to hear changes instantly; to be able to try out orchestrational ideas with sampled instruments rather than just on a piano; to be able to try out new, strange harmonic or rhythmic ideas and hear how they sound in real time....no composer could possibly fail to see it's value. This at least seems fairly uncontroversial.
But there is a divide in modern musical culture between those who regard computer created or altered music as 'fake' in a damning sense and those who are more accepting of it. Without taking sides, our discussion has come to a point where we must at least acknowledge that this divide exists.
In the first place, we should point out that what we have been discussing is profoundly complex, and that the issues involved get confused very quickly. For example, the fact that a recording is made on a computer doesn't mean that it is necessarily 'fake' in any sense. If, for instance, you were to set up 1 or 2 microphones properly and record Mr. Sensitive-Singer-Songwriter doing his emotive thing using a computer as a recorder, the resultant recording will preserve all of the noise and mistakes and other things that constitute the human element just fine. So in one sense, the animus against the inherent 'fakeness' of computer created recordings is simply mistaken. It is true that you can use some of the tools we have been discussing to 'airbrush' peoples performances, but you certainly don't have to do so.
But there are many other issues involved, some of which aren't nearly as simple to dispose of. We will discuss some of these in more detail next time, when we will also have a good long look into the question: 'Just what is MIDI anyway?'.