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

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 01:03:55PM +0200, Dmytro O. Redchuk wrote:
> On Sun 20 Mar 2011, 18:27 Graham Percival wrote:
> > On an objective level, it's allowed many people to create music.  On a
> > subjective level, listening (and watching) Vocaloid music has
> > brought me more pleasure than *any* academic music composition
> We can not control others and their creativity; we even can not be sure that
> our creativity will make others to be more creative.
> 
> What's bad with "American Idol", by the way?-)

As I understand it, "american idol" is a show where people sing
pop songs?

For the people participating -- nothing.  I mean, it might be nice
if people wrote their own music, but american idol is certainly no
worse than a concert of Mozart music in that respect.

For the people merely watching -- they're only passively
"consuming" the show; they're not creating anything.  So I'm not
impressed.  Of course, that applies to my interaction with
Vocaloid.  I haven't created any vocaloid music myself.  I played
with utau for long enough to get it working a bit iffily under
wine, but that's it.  The UI was flakey enough (within wine) that
I wanted to get a lilypond->utau script working, but then I
stopped working on that so I could get Vivi up to the current
milestone.

> Mmm... Can we measure the "creativity factor" we give to other people by our
> creativity?..

Well, in that respect, I suppose that we could evaluate American
Idol in terms of (maybe?) inspiring people to sing or perform more
music?

> Yes, i am rather pessimistic about Vocaloid's "creativity factor", regardless
> of how many people will be able to "produce music" with these technologies.

Well, Vocaloid is highly influential for me changing my phd from
computer-assisted music education to... well... Vivi.

> ppps. :-) Just imagined a picture: somewhere in the future a teacher gave a
> task "to produce some music". All kids made good pieces using
> "vocaloidal-boxes" in 5-15 minutes; but one, who killed me with her
> creativity, spent an hour to type in lilypond what she "produced" breathing in
> panpipe, crazy and "crappy" pitches .)

That scene isn't anything new; there's already software like "band
in a box" which can automatically fill in patterns.  (chord
patterns, drum patterns, etc)  The art of making music with such
software is a question of which patterns go together (for the
background layers), and then making up a melody to go with it.

*shrug*
Some forms of music frown on repetitive / predicatable patterns.
Other forms don't mind it.  I mean, if you look at the harmonic
structure of the exposition of a Mozart sonata, you're probably
not going to see any surprising harmonic progressions.  If you
look at a Baroque minuet, you'll see a highly structured piece of
music whose names I've forgotten.  If you look at an opera from a
certain time period and certain country, the bass singer is always
the bad guy, the tenor is always the good guy, the soprano is
always the love interest, etc.  ick, those two examples would make
a lot more sense if I could remember any details from second-year
history...

Pop music (and thus a lot of Vocaloid stuff) gets a bad rap for
using the I IV V I chord progression a lot, but I don't see that
amount of predictability to be any worse than classical music's
predictability of beat strength in 4/4 time
(strong-weak-medium-weak).

Cheers,
- Graham