Category: Fall 22

While reading this week’s article, I found myself asking — Why do we enjoy live coding?

“But the longer we listen, the more boring it becomes. Our sense of anticipation grows as we wait for something more, for change, uncertainty, the unpredictable, the resumption of information.”

Is it because of the entropy it creates? We can unconsciously seek experiences that are chaotic and unpredictable, and creating this in a predictable, coding environment can seem safe and exciting.

“Random corruption should not be confused with random generation.”

When differentiating between corruption and generation, I wonder if it’s this precise noise that is so appealing about live coding.

Are there people who don’t / can’t enjoy this random noise “corruption”? It seems that at times, performances can get intense on visuals and audio. Speaking from personal experience of creating a visually intense experience in another IM class, people with epilepsy were advised not to part-take in it during the showcase, because it could trigger a physical response. So is it the same with live coding? Can some of the improvisation elements get so out of control that they become triggering?

According to the writer, when things like randomness and noise come into play, music can sound more organic and engaging to the listener and can help trigger different emotions.
This made me think of instances where I would be listening to a song I’d never heard before. It happens, that for some songs, I would unconsciously predict the next couple words of the lyrics, or complete the upcoming part of the melody in my head.
Whenever this happens, I always leave feeling a bit bored, if not even a little disappointed. Therefore, I do believe that some form of unpredictability in music is what captivates us the most.
Although predictability in music can be comforting at times, it can also be a little irritating. You don’t want every song you listen to or make to just blend into the next. And, randomness as a compositional tool can set the piece apart.
I acknowledge that this might be regarding our expectations when we’re discovering a song or a musical piece for the first time, and it’s different if we are already familiar with a song and just enjoy coming back to it.

 

Spiegel believes that “random corruption should not be confused with random generation.” This, to me, highlights the idea that things should be done with intention and moderation.
For example, I have a friend who is a very talented singer, but during his earlier singing years, he used to always incorporate a little way too many runs into the song. I found this impressive, certainly, but not too enjoyable to listen to. When trying to add interesting elements to a piece, you don’t want to lose the original sound or message and overshadow it with randomness and change. The goal is to simply embellish what’s already there.
Therefore, I believe that not all random additions work, and not all random sounds that do work should be kept in.

“Our sense of anticipation grows as we wait for something more, for change, uncertainty, the unpredictable, the resumption of information”

 

This sentence in the article was the first thing that caught my attention. Spiegel claims that the same block of music becomes boring the more we listen to it. While I do agree with this and I have experienced it, especially while preparing for the in-class performance, I still have to wonder to what extent this applies. When I take into consideration the songs and music I listen to, I find myself playing the same playlist every time, despite knowing each song in there by heart. This made me wonder why is it that we get bored of some music faster than other ones? If what Spiegel said is true, then why do we keep coming back to the same songs over and over again despite knowing exactly how the progress? 

 

Spiegel mentions that by adding noise to the composition, we can make it more interesting because of the decrease in predictability. But as mentioned in class, we still need to have some sort of rhythm or base for the music to sound good. How do we know how much randomness or noise is too much? How do we find the balance between predictability and randomness to create a piece that will always be engaging? Is it even possible to create a piece that will never get boring?  

​ This passage talks about the application of information theory in music. It tells that, listening to simple repetitions of a music pattern, people will feel musical at first but gradually bored later. To avoid getting boring, noise or randomness can be used in music.

​ However, not just any random noise should be added to the music. As the author states the nature of noise in music is like this:

Noise is the replacement of explicitly defined information with random data at random times. It’s the degradation of otherwise fully intelligible signal.

So when we want to make music more interesting by adding noise, we must also risk that other meaningful parts will be overshadowed by the noise. At the same time, if the noise added doesn’t fit the structure of the music at all, the music itself can be destroyed as well.

​ After the trial this week, I think the noise is something essential in live coding. Live coders need time to code. In other words, music needs to repeat, not to mention that mistakes can happen. So, some randomness or some ingenious noise can stay in patterns, so that the music we are making would not bore the audience. What kinds of noise should be used are the things that need to be familiar with, too.

​ As for the problem mentioned in the passage and some classmates’ blogs: would noise make them more musical? If we are only talking about classical music now, I would say no. But current music is floating and creating. Reasonable noise can be treated as part of the music. If we consider music as a tool to bring a particular atmosphere, such as live coding in a nightclub, the positive effect of noise is even more unquestionable.

There are two things in this article that interest me the most, the first one is about the author’s point of “the audience will get bored when listening to one pattern if it lacks development, evolution, and form”, and the second one is about the author’s opinion of “randomness is a relativistic phenomenon”. I would also like to talk about how these two points can be connected to the topic of our course, which is live coding.

The first point I mentioned here resonates strongly with my live performance this week. For this week’s live performance, I decided to do something more like live coding in my opinion, which is typing out codes in a limited amount of time. Obviously, this was a rather unsuccessful strategy, as I was unable to type the codes very quickly. This also made the music I made lack complexity and variation. Compared to my classmates’ work, I think I did get bored when listening to my own work as well. The author also mentions later that “our sense of anticipation grows as we wait for something more, for change, uncertainty, the unpredictable, the resumption of information”. This reminds me of the “?” Aaron mentioned during class, also “# gain (range x x rand)”. These can definitely bring change and uncertainty to the music. However, I believe that it would be unclear whether these changes and uncertainties can bring a good effect to the music itself. It’s true that as live coders, we are supposed to make more random things that contain high improvisational effects, these effects may make the music very noisy and even dissonant. This may be my personal preference, but I still believe that we should add random elements to the music with the aim of just making random things. The addition of these random elements should be based on whether the music itself sounds good.

For the second point, the author explains her point by saying “any signal, no matter how internally consistent or meaningful it is within its own context, may be perceived as random noise relative to some other coherent signal”. I agree with this and this reminds me of comparing math rock with “twinkle star” (which has the exact same rhythm pattern). Obviously, the math rock will be considered “more random” than the latter as its rhythm pattern is unconventional. 

When a person holds an instrument to play, they don’t always intend to produce the resulting sounds. Sometimes they play a single random note–more so with the intent to play than the intent to create pleasant sounds–and another one follows, and another one; initial chaos that eventually becomes an orderly symphony. How can we reproduce this process through code? How can we make randomly pleasant sounds? True randomness is hard to define in reality, and I’m sure the author would argue that the very first notes played by the person in my example, aren’t truly random. He’d argue that they are rather the result of meaningful noise that loses its meaning in a musical context. A ‘random’ function, and even the seemingly natural ‘noise’, are based on randomly occurring physical phenomena–like cosmic radiation or radioactive decay. The thought that some other phenomenon that has a random frequency that resonates with music could exist is fascinating, and I would love to see its applications.

 

In the meanwhile anything generated randomly on Tidal (even with noise) sounds awful lol.

This reading reiterates various concepts that we have discussed in class over the past few weeks. Most of the ideas were touched upon in one way or another, and a point that I, as well as anyone else I assume, resonate with is that as we listen to music, “we wait for something more, for change, uncertainty, the unpredictable”. Once any of these are encountered, the song or music would become more interesting or less boring. The change could be anything from introducing new instruments, breaking a cycle, speeding up the sounds, or adding a beat drop, which we have also discussed in class as we are always anticipating anything of this sort. The unpredictability, aspect is often a hit or miss I feel. Considering live coding, for example, if we would have been put on the spot to perform using tidal cycles with no prior background in what different audios or samples sound like and go into an unpredictable track, there is a chance it might be too noisy. However, there is still always a chance that it could also lead to a happy accident.


The “noise” I am bringing up is not the same as what the author mentions when she suggests the introduction of noise to make it sound more interesting. She discusses it in the same way that uncertainty would result in more engaging sounds, maybe by incorporating random corruption. This is a point that Aaron has made several times in class, adding ‘?’ or ‘degradeBy’ to drop random notes. This adds some spice to the music that we’re creating, avoiding repetition and possible boredom for the listener. From making these changes live together in class and when I was testing out and experimenting for the live performance earlier this week, I would definitely agree that these small changes actual have a significant impact on the sound. However, this leads to the same question that the author poses, is it more musical?