Production Thoughts

Having said that I am LOVING the Augmented Strings VST from Arturia, so am full on midi tonight pretending to be Wojciech Kilar or some shit while my missus is watching some Billie Eilish doc.

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more of this de-familiarization

The “Uncanny”1 (1919)

SIGMUND FREUD

I

It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to in- vestigate the subject of aesthetics even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling.

The German word unheimlich4 is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “be- longing to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything which is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation cannot be inverted. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny.

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanni- ness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better orientated in his environment a per- son is, the less readily will he get the impression of some- thing uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.

It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation of unheimlich with unfamiliar. (Jentsch is another guy who dipped into the uncanny)

LATIN: (K. E. Gorges, Deutschlateinisches Wörterbuch, 1898). Ein unheimlicher Ort [an uncanny place]—locus suspectus; in unheimlicher Nachtzeit [in the dismal night hours]—intempesta nocte.

GREEK: (Rost’s and Schenki’s Lexikons). Xenos strange, foreign.

ENGLISH: (from dictionaries by Lucas, Bellow, Flügel, Muret-Sanders). Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repul- sive fellow.

FRENCH: (Sachs-Villatte). Inquiétant, sinistre, lugubre, mal à son aise.

SP ANISH: (Tollhausen, 1889). Sospechoso, de mal aguëro, lugubre, siniestro.

The Italian and the Portuguese seem to content them- selves with words which we should describe as circumlocutions. In Arabic and Hebrew “uncanny” means the same as “daemonic,” “gruesome.”

Freud_the_Uncanny.pdf (267.6 KB)

I thought uncanny was generally something /just off/ of familiar, where as novelty is generally something quite different from familiar. So like a slightly detuned and time stretched guitar is going to be uncanny, where as a distorted guitar would be more novel. However, if you listen to a lot of detuned time stretched guitar, but never really heard a distorted one before, I suppose the distorted one would be more uncanny

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yeah the text goes into expand on the idea after i cut the quote
just the tip :eyes:

i’m thinking very zoomed out/abstractly about this

but to add to cyclos point of ‘sensing’ something about sample based music that collapses it back into itself and makes it familiar/takes it back to familiarity or not far away enough from where it ‘needs to take off to’. - to be a worthy creative endeavor sort of move - direction-thing

theres also the ghost of hardware, where you cant escape the sound a machine makes
where you have to connect a million modules to get away from its essence

so on one side you have lazy hip hop loop guys that sound like the 70s records they sampled from
and who chase authenticity or the right old compressor - to not stray away from a sound they try to live up to but restrict every creative decisions they could make

on the other you have a uniform hardware sound where tons of artists sound exactly the same - and where all the creative decisions they make are entirely informed by the restrictions of the hardware

so whatever extreme you might fall into - youds have to try to de-familiarize yourself from ‘the standards’ or the nuum you are in

but mostly i would say you have to not give a fuck - and enjoy not having these standards, but maybe try to consider theres angles you can use - the rules people have and the good advice they give is likely already susceptible to falling into different shades of cliché

so experiment and make deliberate not to dos, that you then grow accustomed to and end up owning - because thats likely less exhausted territory/ normalized paths

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can anyone read this thread without signing up?

indeed

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okay was gonna name some names
and examples
not gonna

I have only ever used the term “uncanny” for something which occurs that is unbelievable; but is repeated successfully over and over! I really like card tricks, so that’s a subject where I would often use the word. Bottom Deal me a AceSpades once, it is a facet of Randomness. The second time, a pattern. Third, unbelievable! And at some point after that the term Uncanny will spring into the newly rich vocabularies of the newly monetarily poor. :innocent:

the ghost of hardware is an interesting thought

its weird though how perhaps chasing a specific sound through technique or hardware, almost in a way makes the creation less authentic

it is trying to be, when perhaps it just should be

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What exactly is the end goal though? Let’s say three people make the exact same sound, one acoustically, one through synthesis, and one through sampling (not by sampling this sound, but producing the same result from a different sound) is one more valuable than another?

Each could easily argue why their version of the sound is best. The instrument is played by a human. There’s certain techniques and such you can do with a real instrument that you can’t do on a computer.
But the computerized versions would have similar arguments.

I suppose it’s about the creative mindset around the production of each, then.

Although, personally, I tend to have a sound in mind, and then create the sound using whatever method is going to achieve the end goal the easiest/best.

1 BigUp

They have different potential quality in terms of a recording.

Acoustic - event takes place in reality, natural setting
Sampled - recorded acoustic event, but constrained by bitrate of analog to digital convertors
Synthesized - event never takes place and is generated

If your goal is realism, that’s not very hard to figure out. If it’s not, then it doesn’t really matter either way.

It’s simple economics. I know absolutely nothing about it… (Who farted?)

Edit: I know a little bit about it. Like all other professions, it boils down to simplicity. I however do not know how to simplify it further because I am not a professional.

If however you still care to know my perspective on things, I highly recommend reading The Time Machine by HG Wells. In summary, the time traveler is telling his story of how he traveled through time to men of his time.

To me, the time traveler in that story represents the “perfect artist” who dazzles his audience (in this fiction, with his story of traveling through time). & some men don’t even believe him! Obviously because it’s such a crazy idea to have actually created a working time machine.

…this all has something to do with production (expect largely from a novel perspective) Not the perspective of analog/ DAW techniques.

“A man can dream.” woooooooi

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I might sample all of you.

Who, at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, actually even cares :person_shrugging:

exactly

its definitely a thing in techno

but also like jdilla mpc vibes

i’m talking about breaking away from these molds because it introduces new dimensions for listening

so like the process is a part of it - and people can take that as seriously as they want - but

Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity”

the listening to music /goal

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Ah alright I see what you mean

It’s all hardware, all the way down

You think your computer isn’t an instrument?

It’s all the same shit. Tools and chisels and inventing reason

My Akai sampler is really just a computer designed to do one thing.

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