[HN Gopher] Designing for Improvisation (2010)
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       Designing for Improvisation (2010)
        
       Author : brm
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2022-08-25 15:20 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (bobulate.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (bobulate.com)
        
       | midenginedcoupe wrote:
       | Jazz musician and programmer here.
       | 
       | I wish people held off postulating about improvisation until they
       | understood the first thing about it.
       | 
       | First off, modal jazz wasn't invented by Miles on the Kind of
       | Blue sessions. He'd even used it himself in earlier recordings.
       | Also, modal jazz isn't inherently more simple than what had gone
       | before. Is it _really_ more simple than the blues scale? Nah.
       | 
       | And then this
       | 
       | > Instead of the control coming from the composer (read: the
       | designer), modal jazz promotes a sense of discovery.
       | 
       | is just nonsense. Every other solo section on every other
       | recording was constrained by the composer, by specifying the
       | chord sequence. Whether that's a one-chord vamp or the later
       | Giant Steps-style gymnastics. And what happened on this recording
       | is the composer specified the chord sequence and then on top of
       | that, told the soloists what notes to choose from when soloing.
       | If anything, that's even _more_ control from the composer than
       | what came before. And it being modal doesn't promote any more of
       | a sense of discovery than any other framework for choosing notes
       | from the time.
       | 
       | I could go on, but I'd just get more cross. Worse, it reminded me
       | of an old talk by Kent Beck on Jazz. IIRC about a tool he'd built
       | on top of Eclipse? Either way, he horrendously massacared the
       | concept of jazz and improvisation, too.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | yeeyeeyee wrote:
       | I am very frustrated by this article and I don't know why. I
       | mean, they're right, improvisation, that's a good model for how
       | you should design your social networking service. But just given
       | how "realtime systems" (read: social media) evolved from
       | 2010-2022, somehow I feel like this is not what Miles Davis
       | _stood for_.
        
       | amp108 wrote:
       | I was really confused, and thought I'd missed out on a big chunk
       | of music theory, when I read this. Glad to see it wasn't my
       | understanding, but the author's.
        
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