Discuss Notion Music Composition Software here.
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There is a conversation about these things in a different topic, but the title is not so specific, hence this topic . . . :)

THOUGHTS

I think it makes sense to focus on several things:

(1) What are virtual instruments, and what can they do?

(2) What is the terminology for music notation and how does it relate to acoustic physics?

(3) How does one achieve the highest realism with a combination of virtual instruments, effects plug-ins, and advanced techniques?

(4) Is it necessary to use articulations, dynamic marks, and other components of music notation?

(5) Can effects plug-ins be used in Studio One rather than articulations, dynamic marks, and other components of music notation?

(6) Can playing styles like vibrato be emulated?

(7) Is time discrete (Copenhagen School) or continuous (Realism)?

(8) Was Isaac Newton a brilliant trickster who invented Calculus to avoid the difficulties of explaining mechanics when time is continuous rather than discrete?

(9) Is there anything between the "slices" of Calculus and discrete time?

(10) Was John Lennon profoundly brilliant when he wrote that "Nothing is real"?

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(11) Is music a Gestalt?

Lots of FUN! :)

Surf.Whammy's YouTube Channel

The Surf Whammys

Sinkhorn's Dilemma: Every paradox has at least one non-trivial solution!
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by Surf.Whammy on Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:34 am
Time is a good starting place . . . :)

THOUGHTS

Before making a few observations about time, I think it will be useful to reveal a few things about myself, which I do occasionally, hence have already written remarks . . .

Regarding I. Q., when I was in the fifth grade the teacher decided it was time to teach the class how to multiply; so after lunch she devoted the next hour to teaching multiplication . . .

For the first few days, I was quite excited and in some respects overjoyed, because I love mathematics; but after a few days, I would sneak out of the classroom and crawl around underneath the building, which was raised on piers, except that the teacher discovered I was doing this; so when there was a pop quiz, she would bang on the floor, and I would return to the classroom and take the pop quiz, always getting a perfect score, which I suppose was a bit confusing for the teacher; and the teacher, apparently not knowing what else to do to make sense of my behaviors, one day told me there was a fellow in another classroom who was having a lot of trouble with puzzles and that I was supposed to help him solve his puzzles, which I did; and the fellow certainly was having a lot of trouble with what for me were really simple puzzles . . .

Everything continued as usual for about a week or two; and then the teacher was very happy one day and told me that I could do whatever I wanted to do--including crawling around underneath the classroom--and this was all I knew about the matter for the next 20 or so years, at which time my sister, who is a medical doctor, told me the fellow with the puzzles actually was a psychologist and that he had given me an I. Q. Test on which my score was "well over 170", since at the time 170 was the highest possible score on the standard !. Q. Test, and this was interesting, for sure . . .

For sure!

In retrospect, my perspective is that it might have made more sense for the teacher simply to ask me why I preferred to crawl around underneath the classroom when she was teaching the class how to do multiplication, since the reality was (a) that I had been doing two-digit multiplication in my mind for years and (b) the idea that anyone could get to the fifth grade and not know how to multiply was mind-boggling; so instead of being bored silly, I decided to use the time productively to study the plumbing pipes, which I could see, since the building was on piers and there were hot and cold water pipes as well as drain pipes and vent stacks, which was quite fascinating, because I had changed my career goal from (a) being a garbage truck owner-operator to (b) being a plumber after spending the summer with my maternal grandmother whose house was on piers and a plumber was upgrading the drain lines--this being a key aspect due to the plumber having a melting pot for lead, all sorts of fascinating plumbing tools, and perhaps most importantly the ability and power to control fire (melting lead) . . .

I have read that Albert Einstein had an I. Q. of approximately 150; so in this respect, I am "more intelligent" or "smarter" than him--except that here in the sound isolation studio it's a selective type of thing . . .

One way to explain this is to observe that my mother had the ability to take a course in anything and make an "A" but then a few days after the course was completed generally forgot everything about it--unless it was related specifically to writing . . .

My father was an electrical engineer, and on the mathematics side could take the same course and make a "C", but not because he was less smart than my mother, instead because once he understood the mathematics he became bored and did not like to waste more time on it . . .

The difference being that a few days after courses, my mother would forget everything'; but my father could design the avionics for an airplane, which he did as a senior design engineer for The Boeing Company and later for Lockheed Martin . . .

I am somewhere in the middle but more like my mother for some things . . .

I have had college level mathematics courses through Advanced Calculus and Probability and Statistics with Calculus but I would be hard-pressed to devise a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. . . .

For me, the practical aspect is that a few weeks are each quarter or semester I would forget nearly everything about mathematics; so for each new mathematics course I had to rediscover and relearn everything, plus the new material . . .

Sometimes, in an effort to appear that I knew everything in vast detail, on tests I would make-up stuff so my test answers looked "busy" . . .

The answers appeared pretty much instantly, but I thought it was necessary to do a somewhat detailed "proof", hence I made-up stuff . . .

The Calculus III professor noticed this and had an interesting conversation with me in which he was a bit puzzled and was wondering if I was cheating on tests; since for example, he observed that in a proof, I multiplied one side of the equation by negative one and the other side by positive one, which was goofy, but then a few lines later I reversed it to make it look "better" . . .

His advice was "Don't skip steps." :+1

Jumping to Einstein, I read about General Relativity decades ago but was able to make only a tiny bit of sense of it, since I was vastly confused by things called "tensors", which continued for several decades until in a conversation someone told me that tensors are the same as curl . . .

I see curl in my mind, so that bit of help led to an epiphany . . .

My favorite physicists are Lee Smolin and Nima Arakani-Hamed . . .

Lee Smolin explains things the way I think, as does Nima Arkani-Hamed--except that Nima is a virtuoso with mathematics, for which I hear the words and see the equations but generally do not understand any of it until he switches to the mode Lee Smolin uses and explains everything with a drawing and high-level English . . .

Yet, the more times I watch Nima Arkani-Hamed lectures, the more tiny bits of the information begin to make sense . . .

It's slow progress, but it's progress . . .

I spend as much time thinking about particle physics as thinking about music, as well as composing, performing, arranging, producing, and audio engineering songs, including writing lyrics . . .

From watching Lee Smolin lectures on YouTube, I became aware in an immediately conscious way that there are two theories of time:

(1) Copenhagen School: Time is discrete and things only come into existence when a human observes them.

(2) Realism: Time is continuous and things exist independently of being observed by humans.

Connecting a few more dots, I now think Isaac Newton was a brilliant trickster who created Calculus to avoid having to explain mechanics to people who could not easily comprehend time being continuous . . .

More to the point, when I was in college I took Calculus I and Calculus II four times each with grades ranging from "F" to "C"; and it continues to make little logical sense to me . . .

In contrast, I took Calculus III one time; had an excellent professor; and made an "A" . . .

I took Differential Equations two times, making an "F" the first time but making an "A" the second time, where the second time was after taking Calculus III and the professor explaining the primary concept of Differential Equations in a way that I understood . . .

Specifically, the professor explained that researchers made high-speed films of house flies as they followed a sweaty human in a room; and after detailed analyses, the researchers concluded that the flies were solving Differential Equations in real-time, which is the reason once a fly gets your scent, they track you flawlessly and you cannot avoid them . . .

It's also useful to know that I hear words spoken in my mind; and I hear music in my mind--literally . . .

I have constant conversations with myself in my mind; and starting about 25 years ago I became interested on dialogue and screenplay writing; so instead of having conversations only with myself, I also have conversations with a virtual festival of pretend characters--including the pretend characters having conversations among themselves--when I am having a bit of FUN with dialogue, which includes various accents and so forth, where one perhaps odd bit of information is that the key to sounding like a person from India is to use gerunds . . .

My perspective on people from India is that they tend too be very smart and to have interesting concepts of self; so that at times they reflect on themselves and educate everyone in the room--instead of saying "I am going to the store", they inform everyone around them, "I am wanting to be going to the store" or something similar . . .

That is not something stupid people can do . . .

It requires (a) being smart, (b) having a keen sense of self, and (c) being able to step outside and observe yourself . . .

Continuing with the perhaps odd observations about spoken Indian accents, this relates to music here in the sound isolation studio due to Daler Mehndi being my favorite Indian singer and entertainer . . .

Daler Mehndi exudes happiness . . .

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In fact, I "borrowed" some his moves for my YouTube video about Angela Gossow's underpants . . .

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I am not the only person who "borrowed" moves from Daler Mehndi's 1998 hit song . . .

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When reading, I call it "slow reading" or "hearing reading"; but there also is speed-reading, where I do not hear words spoken, which is something I taught myself how to do over several years . . .

On the music side, it's a bit like "Name that Tune" on the Johnny Carson "Tonight" show, where for example, I hear the melody and lyrics for Beatles songs--as well as instrument parts--in my mind; and at times I do this with Symphonic and Big Band music or any other type of music that interests me at the moment . . .

All this stuff occurs in time; and time is a fundamental aspect of music, where pitch, tone, melody, chords, counterpoint, and harmony are composed and created with vibrations that occur over time--frequencies, if you prefer . . .

Pure tones are sine waves, but when you add harmonics, overtones, odd and even, this is what defines the way a violin sounds as contrasted to an oboe, flute, drum, cymbal, or any other type of instrument, including singing; and this is timbre, which is part of what I call "texture" . . .

Notes have duration; and when a cascading set of echo units is applied, it becomes possible to have a bit of FUN with time . . .

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The Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaster ~ Custom Modded with Two Independent Output Signals

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Effects Pedals and Fulltone Tube Tape Echo (Dual DigiTech Whammy Pedals and Wah-Wah Pedals on Floor Not Shown)
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When a song has a basic rhythm section (drumkit, bass, chords, and melody), the various notes and corresponding sounds interact in ways that transcend time and become a Gestalt, where the music is more than the simple sum of the individual parts . . .

More specifically, I suggest that part of what happens in a song occurs in the sonic spaces between discrete instants of time, which is one of the reasons I am fascinated by reverberation and echo units (real or effects plug-ins) . . .

For those folks who play or sing and have echo units, there is a way to start a series of echoes and then to play with or into the echoes, thereby "surfing" the echoes . . .

Researchers tell us that to a honey bee, a motion picture appears as a slow series of individual frames, which is a bit disturbing; but if you look at a woofer (deep bass loudspeaker) when music is playing, it's always moving . . .

Perhaps to some organism with a vastly rapid vision system, it appears like individual frames or steps, but probably not . . .

Individual notes might start and stop according to finite instants in time; but overall everything is bouncing around continuously, and this is where music has the potential to appear in the "in-between" parts of spacetime . . .

Jumping back to physics for a moment, in the late-1970s a new set of particles called "quarks" were discovered--sometimes every few weeks for a new one--and after a while this started annoying me greatly and led to making an effort to stop the "getting smaller" madness, with the result being a treatise on what I call "Absolute Fundamental Units: (AFU)" where the double entendre "AFU" aspect is by design :P . . .

[NOTE: I published the original version of this treatise in one of my technical books on Visual Basic software engineering, so it's in the Library of Congress and is part of the official historical record . . . ]

"The Theory of the Absolute Fundamental Units of the Universe (May 2017 revision) (PDF, 10 pages)

I included this bit of information because the current results of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)--more properly the total absence of finding anything beyond the Higgs Boson--do two primary things:

(1) It makes the string theory and supersymmetry (SUSY) folks look like idiots.

(2) Until something.new actually is discovered, it makes me profoundly brilliant--at least temporarily and in my mind.

Explained another way, (a) the supposedly "smart folks" are not so smart as they imagined and (b) the "idiot" gets to join the group at equal or greater stature . . . :P

This is easier to understand when one watches a few Lee Smolin and Nima Arkani-Hamed YouTube lectures, with these two being personal favorites:

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SUMMARY

Music is a language of time . . .

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Lots of FUN! :)

Surf.Whammy's YouTube Channel

The Surf Whammys

Sinkhorn's Dilemma: Every paradox has at least one non-trivial solution!

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