Re: [OT] Vivi, the Virtual Violinist, plays LilyPond music

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 12:38:48PM -0400, Marc Mouries wrote:
> On 3/17/2011 11:31 AM, Graham Percival wrote:
> >Art conveys emotions which are the one thing that make us human
> >>and thus should be played by human.
> >"should be"?  Hmm.  "Art conveys emotions, and thus sheet music
> >should be engraved by a human".
> You are mixing unrelated things. The analogy is about getting
> emotion from listening or watching the artifact produced. While i
> find electronic engraving useful, people find ancient manual
> engraving much nicer.

But you're not arguing that I should not be allowed to use
computer engraving if I want to.

> i just don't like this piece and it's out of tune. One vocaloid
> generated song I enjoy is this:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm2IQ0y2J0Q

ick.  I consider that to be one of the worst "meme videos" that
people did with Miku.

What about a ballad?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cAnspI1C0o

> >Guess why I don't have audio recordings of my compositions on my
> >website?
>
> There is a college kid here who is playing in a quartet and started
> to include his own composition in their recital.  You could
> certainly do the same, create your own quartet and play your own
> composition.

Sure!  Each time I move to a new continent (3 times in the past 3
years, and probably a 4th coming up in 18 months), I can make new
highly-skilled string-playing friends, become sufficiently
friendly so that I can ask them to practice for a few hours and
then spend a few hours making recordings.  And whenever I want to
add a different instrument, I can become friends with another
performer, again becoming sufficiently good friends that I can ask
them to do about 10 hours of work for no pay.  Oh yeah, and since
these recordings would be open-source, they of course would get no
royalties or anything like that.

That's a lot of "friendship" to impose.

Alternatively, I could pay people.  Let's see... for my cello
trios, I'd need one cellist (with at least 15 years of experience)
to practice for about 4 hours, and two more cellists to practice
for 2 hours.  Then add in a 2-hour recording session.  That's...
hmm, what's the going rate for cellists with 15-20 years of
classical experience?  Let's call it CDN $100 ?  And renting a
recording studio for 2 hours, and a sound technician... I honestly
have no idea.  $1000?  that's probably too low, but whatever.

So I'm now looking at CND $2000 to create a recording of one
5-minute piece.  Oh, but I probably need to pay the musicians
extra to be happy with the "no royalties" thing.  As a composer, I
could write one of those every week... but at those prices, I
think I'd only write one every year.


OR, I could just give the .ly file to Vivi version 9.4, and
produce a decent-sounding .wav file in 60 seconds.  For free.  And
(legally) make the result open-source as well.

That sounds like a clear win to me.


> I complain because it's more than a matter of taste. The impact is
> bigger than what it seems.

Yes, but I think the impact of making it easier and better for
music *composers* will outweigh any inconvience for music
*performers*.

Is Vocaloid ruining the market for jpop singers?  Maybe... but in
exchange, it's created a market for thousands of people to create
music where it was previously impossible.  I mean, in theory I
could learn oboe or piano -- but unless I have a sex change
operation and massive throat reconstruction surgery, there's no
way that I could ever sing like Miku Hatsune.  There's a huge
amount of human creativity involved in Vocaloid, Miku Miku Dance,
and the like.  I think the good of that *far* outweighs any
(alleged) harm that Vocaloid is doing to professional pop music in
Japan.

Cheers,
- Graham