Music Controllers

The other day, I was going through my collection of pitched and un-pitched audio fragments that I use in my ambient music and determining their actual pitch. I didn't have an instrument with me at the time, and I used an online piano. Using a mouse to hit the keys felt so awkward; I felt as if I hadn't played the piano in decades and was re-learning it. This must be the experience of playing music using only computers (including smartphones) as instruments. 

But what if the experience is reversed--where all you've ever played is a virtual keyboard (or even a very small one) and then use an 88-key weighted keyboard or an acoustic grand? This must seem just a disorienting as it slows down the process of music-making. 

The same disorientation must occur when having to access knowledge using the Standard understanding, not the slang or dialect that you've operated on. Or, knowing the Standards very well, then having to use a slang. This where it gets clumsy, especially in the ability to improvise: Classical musicians attempt to translate a traditional language to all the various individual slangs musicians might bring to the process, and different ways of looking at music. The most universal and primal way is using hands and feet and a surface--as percussive music with mostly no pitch. (One could write songs simply by drumming on the body and using the voice). Every instrument beyond that is just an extension. But not all extensions (as in the case of the mouse-controlled piano) redound naturally to the body, and how emotions are naturally channeled (primarily) through hands and feet, not the tip of the index finger.

Ultimately, the inner (emotional) direction is both universal and standard for making music; we all know music instinctively. But computers have thrown a curveball into music-making, precisely in relation to the distance between rhythm as being a primal instinct, and the myriad of non-standard ways a computer will estrange humans from making music. But it is also satisfying from a creative standpoint to play in the gap between the two and invent instruments that mechanize music-making in some fashion. The obvious examples are the harpsichord and pianoforte, which used remote-controlled plectrums/hammers. The mouse-click is the same idea, but the user has no idea of the process in which that process is happening electronically but nonetheless interprets it as having been something that was done with the body (the fingertip), or in the sense of algorithmic music, strings of text typed with fingertips.

Listening to recordings ("accessing" music) as being defined as music participation for at least a century also creates a gap between sound production and what emanates from speakers and headphones. Therefore, no one even knows how to feel 4/4 or 6/8 for example. But people still can dance to it. Dance is the one thing people do mostly without the interference of a computer, although motion-capture is one example where it is used to digitize gestures.

To be continued...