[HN Gopher] Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers
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Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers
Author : bschne
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-07-13 15:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.perfectcircuit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.perfectcircuit.com)
| brudgers wrote:
| Roland's _Practical Synthesis for Electronic Music, Volume 2_
| starts with a discussion of modular notation. To me, it 's very
| well thought out.
|
| https://reaktorplayer.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/...
| rectang wrote:
| This is likely to be personal incompatibility with Roland's
| style, but I've always found Roland user interface designs to
| be inscrutable banks of deep menus, arbitrary buttons, tiny
| screens, and "wizard" style branching between wholly disparate
| aesthetic presets that change everything at once. I have never
| been able to intuit and memorize Roland gear well enough to
| customize according to my own mental models. The idea that
| anything Roland would be held aloft as "well thought out" by
| somebody is baffling to me.
|
| Roland's popularity and success speaks for itself so there's no
| need to prove anything. Their UIs are just completely at odds
| with my personal creative flow.
|
| Back in the late 90s I mixed an entire album on a VS-880 (with
| good results, it sold a couple thousand copies and got decent
| college radio airplay) so I've definitely given them a chance
| and gotten the full experience -- but that damn thing fought me
| relentlessly. None of the motions I learned stuck with me.
|
| I feel the same way about a lot of hardware electronic gear (I
| was utterly defeated by an Akai sampler around the same time).
| The exceptions are the interfaces that hew to a consistent
| theoretical model and emphasize tweaking of individual
| parameters rather than selection of presets. I was highly
| productive within the Logic Audio environment; I had good
| impressions of the Nord Modular and its GUI software.
|
| Any Roland-style modeling of modular synthesis is likely to
| leave me behind. Glad it works for you and many others, though!
| brudgers wrote:
| The new Roland technical strategy does not speak to me
| either.
|
| The book is from Roland's 100M modular system and written in
| the late 1970's or early 80's. That version of the System 100
| was menuless, entirely analog, and patched with some basic
| normals and wires. I came across the book because my Eurorack
| is mostly Behringer System 100 modules because they are cheap
| as am I.
|
| ===
|
| I picked up a VS880 for about $100 last year and use it as my
| primary multitrack recorder because I prefer not to use
| general purpose computers for creative work anymore and it's
| a hobby. I have a ZuluSCSI plugged into the back and record
| to an SD card on that.
|
| This year, I made a commitment to learn how to use it...not
| much point in selling it...and do more recording. What I like
| about it is not the menus. It's that being the first in the
| series, the design brief seems to have been a better tape
| machine and alternative to ADAT. Later models were competing
| with DAWs.
|
| Because the VS880 is fanless, I can leave it on all day while
| I do other things (e.g. take a nap). Of course it works for
| me because my musical ambitions are very unambitious.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You're talking about post-D50 Roland. Before the D50 Roland
| made simple analog synths with very intuitive interfaces.
|
| After the D50 - and especially after the DX7, which started
| the one-slider-panel 80s trend - synth interfaces started to
| sprout two-line LCD panels.
|
| Most Roland UIs today are pretty horrific.
| bobvanluijt wrote:
| Interesting that Nelson Goodmanis is mentioned. IMO music
| notation has the same, albeit lesser observable, problem as
| language and that's context. Regardless if it's the Koln concert
| or a modular synth. If we try to capture all context for -let's
| say- the first second of a musical piece, it's almost impossible
| to do.
| dahart wrote:
| What's the context of your opinion? ;) By that I mean, what
| context do you see missing from music notation that should
| normally be there, and what would it accomplish? What is the
| goal behind capturing all context, and when is that goal
| important? Do have examples?
| bobvanluijt wrote:
| The author gives the example of the Koln Concert; we can buy
| scores to play the piece, but the score doesn't contain
| enough information to _really_ replicate the performance.
| That's what I meant by the missing context.
| consf wrote:
| The challenge of fully capturing context
| ziofill wrote:
| Very cool! Synths can 'move' in a bigger musical space than a
| traditional instrument: it's fascinating how musicians can still
| manage to convey a written account of the music.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Another example was put out by the DIY synthesizer kit company
| PAIA [1]. They had a patch notation system in which control
| voltages and connections were represented vertically and sound
| signal flow and processing was represented horizontally. The
| system was presented in a small booklet called The Source, which
| I have been unable to locate online, except for a photo of it
| with a PAIA synth [2].
|
| The Source diagrams resemble the Figure 4 example by Allen
| Strange in TFA.
|
| [1]. https://paia.com/
|
| [2].
| https://www.matrixsynth.com/2012/02/1981-paia-4700-modular.h...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| That sounds a bit like the patch cards for the EMS VCS3; you
| puhed pins into the square patchboard to connect-up the
| modules. If you mounted a piece of card over the patchboard and
| pushed the pins through that, the card became a record of your
| patch.
|
| Of course, you couldn't "read" the card and guess what it
| souned like; the patchcard didn't record the settings of the
| knobs either.
| chaosprint wrote:
| Since my master's studies, I have been researching this topic. I
| highly recommend Professor Thor Magnusson's book, "Sonic Writing"
| (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sonic-writing-9781501313868/), as
| well as all of his research.
|
| For example, in this article, he discusses algorithms as
| "Algorithms as Scores" (https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfile
| s/portal/268697/Mag...).
|
| These concepts have profoundly influenced my creation of Glicol
| (https://glicol.org/).
| chambored wrote:
| How does Glicol differ from Supercollider
| (https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider)?
| chaosprint wrote:
| There are indeed some similarities. I was influenced by
| SuperCollider (SC). One of my master's graduation projects
| was a system based on SC:
| https://github.com/chaosprint/Packing. Both SC and Glicol are
| written in low-level languages--SC in C++ and Glicol in Rust.
| Inspired by SC's reusable scsynth, I created glicol_synth as
| an independent audio library.
|
| However, their syntax differs greatly. Glicol's syntax is
| designed for live coding, prioritizing simplicity and
| readability and it's actually partially inspired by modular
| synth(for example: https://glicol.org/demo#minitechno and
| https://glicol.org/tour#fm), while SC's syntax inherits from
| Smalltalk, adhering to standard OOP. SC's ecosystem is
| mature, offering GUI development, various sound processing
| methods, and robust multi-channel support. In contrast,
| Glicol's sound processing is still very minimal and
| experimental. Once the basic architecture, like multi-channel
| and audio graph handling, is established, adding sound
| processing modules will be linear.
|
| Additionally, Glicol's support for both browser and CLI is a
| highlight.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Glicol, my main issue with it is the lack of
| documentation. There's some great getting started guides, but
| beyond that not too much (for example, an example for glicol-
| cli is provided using the built in BD drum, but I can't find
| any reference for all drums available).
|
| As I say, it's otherwise perfect for me, it's sound design
| capabilities are really fantastic
| riiii wrote:
| I sometimes wonder how western music notation would look like if
| it were designed from scratch today with all the knowledge we
| have today.
|
| It feels like the current system is the Imperial system and
| somewhere ought to be the SI metric system.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| It's the worst system, except for all the others.
| dtagames wrote:
| Props for the Churchill democracy reference. And so true.
| This notation problem definitely exists for all synthesizers,
| not just modular ones, and probably at some level for all new
| electronic instruments (which are synths under the hood).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Wonder no more; there's been a few attempts. Here's some from a
| quick HN search: Hummingbird
| (https://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/), Clairnote
| (https://clairnote.org/), and a thread with experimental music
| notation resources (https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-
| notation-resources/...)
| noahlt wrote:
| I love all these attempts because I read the introductions
| nodding my head in agreement--yes traditional notation is
| annoying, yes we can use software to make better notations,
| yes it should be intuitive--and then I get to their actual
| proposal and it's just as inscrutible as traditional
| notation, and, often, uglier.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It turns out that notating the production of sound is
| inherently a very information-theoretically hard problem.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| > It feels like the current system is the Imperial system and
| somewhere ought to be the SI metric system.
|
| Any reason for that beyond "feeling?" And are you very deeply
| familiar with how the current system resolves differences
| between the single chromatic and 12 diatonic scales?
|
| Full disclosure here: I'm a pianist who can generally sight
| read nearly anything (that's well-edited) put in front of me,
| to the point of having music directed opera and theater for a
| living for a while, rather than using my CS and math degrees
| immediately after earning them from UNC.
|
| I've also created an app, BeatScratch (https://beatscratch.io)
| that, among other things, attempts to resolve some of the
| challenges of editing (which I'd argue, again, really involves
| understanding how musical notation maps chromatic and diatonic
| scales between each other - ie "picking the best sequence of
| flats and sharps automatically to maximize readability").
|
| To me, a lot of these "musical notation is outdated" arguments
| seem the same as "there will soon be no need for programmers;
| AI can write all our code," or those arguments insisting some
| "visual programming" paradigm should replace languages like
| Rust and Python.
|
| That is to say... they're arguments made by people who don't
| really understand why the existing systems work the way they do
| and have done so successfully for decades (or centuries).
| riiii wrote:
| My comment was much more of a philosophical question than a
| hard criticism on the current system.
|
| Yes I know why it is the way it is. But if you read your
| comment and your credentials you'll get the gist of what I'm
| thinking.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Do you think that your understanding of the current notation
| has influenced the way you think about music subconsciously?
| I assumed you learned the two together rather than in
| sequence.
| dhosek wrote:
| It also seems to me that in practical terms, the amount of
| changing of synthesis parameters in the midst of a song is
| generally not that great and it's not like we haven't had the
| similar issue of notating pipe organ stops for a few
| centuries.
|
| For that matter, it's not like there aren't centuries of
| alternative notation systems, whether it's tablature, figured
| bass, or neume notation.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Usually, those are notated just with text placed either
| above the staff or between the staff lines (for a single
| organ stop). The normal stops only take a few characters to
| notate. More modern music for more complex organs will
| include a small amount of text indicating when to change
| between stop configurations or sets of manuals that are
| preset.
|
| I can't imagine it would be that hard to notate such things
| for electronic music. Good old text sitting next to your
| good old staff works wonders.
|
| The bigger issue for electronic music, IMO, is the notation
| of sounds that don't fit on a staff well. Modern classical
| composers (who use sheet music extensively in the creative
| process) have various notations for these sorts of things.
| brudgers wrote:
| Today's standard music notation has ecclesiastical roots. In
| part because there were incentives to standardize
| ecclesiastical performances. In part because for a few
| centuries monks were the Europeans most committed to writing.
| consf wrote:
| The current system, while effective and historically rich, has
| complexities and conventions that can be cumbersome
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I would beg to disagree with you. Many attempts have been made
| to replace music notation as we know it, and all have failed.
| In fact, more cultures around the world are adopting "western"
| music notation than ever before. It turns out that the
| expressiveness and information density of the notation are hard
| to match with any other system.
|
| In turn, the notation that we use has become more flexible than
| ever. There are rich notations for microtonal music, various
| playing techniques, clusters of notes, and many more things. If
| you took a score by a modern composer (see Saad Haddad's pieces
| on YouTube) and showed it to JS Bach, it would be
| unrecognizable to him. Music notation is a living language just
| like English is.
|
| By the way, I have been an on-and-off professional in the music
| world, although it is a "side gig" to programming, including
| some composing, tuning, and playing.
|
| However, it is undeniable that music notation is a system made
| for power users. It's not an easy language to learn. The ideas
| of "information dense" and "expressive" should remind you of
| the ideas behind the A programming language.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Obligatory (long-form) watch if you're going to continue
| wondering about this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4
|
| "Notation must die" by Tantacrul
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Didn't Stockhausen create a notation for electronic music? I was
| surprised TFA didn't mention it.
| redrobein wrote:
| Interesting problem to think about. The beauty of modular for me
| has always been that you can take voltage from literally anywhere
| and use it for CV. Modern modules also have an insane variety in
| controls and control surfaces, even for standard things like VCOs
| you have a ton of variety and featuresets. Saving the patch state
| is one thing but actually notating is crazy. Like I can't imagine
| someone being able to read this notation and play it accurately
| like someone sight reading a piano piece. You'd surely require
| familiarity with the setup ahead of time. As for recording it for
| posterity, being verbose and describing what you're doing in full
| works, I guess.
| bandrami wrote:
| Didn't pd basically borrow spice's circuit layout language for
| the way it textually stores patches? I know it exists and it's
| so brittle that nobody ever, ever, edits it, but maybe there's
| a way to make it a little more resilient and editable?
| plussed_reader wrote:
| PD is the non commercial end of Miller Puckettes(and others)
| contributions to Max/MSP, but with soooo much more.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This seems like a somewhat solved problem. Other domains - like
| CGI - use node networks that show active parameter values. There
| isn't a lot of space between a node network and a modular synth
| patch.
|
| The big difference is that you can save and load patches in a
| node editor, but you have to rebuild everything by hand on a
| modular. Even then you're never going to reproduce panel settings
| exactly.
|
| Some people find this appealing, but for me it's the main reason
| I stopped using my big modular and changed to Cherry/Softtube/VCV
| Rack.
|
| It's also true that if you're synth-literate you should be able
| to recreate many patches by ear. There isn't usually that much
| going on, so it looks a lot more complex on paper than it really
| is. Things get more complex if you're using modules that play
| samples or do something exceptionally unique, but even then you
| can usually get in the ballpark - if not exactly, then close
| enough for something that works aesthetically.
|
| The _musical_ part is a different problem. You can scribble
| graphic scores, but they 're far too crude to represent anything
| beyond the vaguest hint of what's going on.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Notated organ music has had the "modular synthesizer" problem
| for centuries. The solution that organists chose was to just
| write stuff down in front of the score. It would probably be a
| lot more clear than any of the suggestions in the article to
| use a node network and a short text description of the settings
| of each node.
|
| People also need to let go of the idea that written music is
| about conveying how to create an exact reproduction of the
| original sound. That's what a recording is for. A musical score
| conveys the scheme under which to produce sound, and notates
| the important characteristics of the sound to produce.
| Everything else is intentionally left up to the performer.
|
| If you don't believe that is valuable, you don't need to use it
| as a tool. However, it allows future musicians to both
| understand what you were thinking and put their own spin on
| your work.
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| Oh look my old discipline. I feel compelled to weigh in since my
| PhD research largely explored this topic albeit in virtual
| reality.
|
| Innovations and discoveries here (including my own) seem largely
| pointless. It's a classic example of "you spent so much wondering
| if you could, you never stopped to think if you should".
|
| The authors final section Does Notation Even Matter hits on the
| larger points I would make - ephemerality of voltage (tuning),
| difference in modular systems, etc., however it fails to make a
| strong case for the need to notate this kind of music apart from
| form(?).
|
| It is disappointing to see these kind of regressive pursuits
| still enjoying any kind of popularity in avant garde music
| circles - they are experimenting with new and novel instruments,
| why would paper, out of all modern mediums available to the
| artist, be the best suited for notating this kind of music?
| brudgers wrote:
| Perfect Circuit is a Los Angeles based retailer specializing in
| electronic instruments. It has practical interest in usage
| issues with modular synthesizers given its large base of
| professional customers in recording, film, and other creative
| industries.
| singingfish wrote:
| bottom of the article has a section "Does Notation Even
| Matter?"
| satyarthms wrote:
| Slightly offtop, but a cool [web-based livecoded modular
| synth](https://felixroos.github.io/kabelsalat/)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Less off-topic, and a cool [web-based] virtual modular synth:
| https://cardinal.kx.studio/
|
| Cardinal runs natively, as a plugin in various formats, and in
| your browser. It is based on VCV Rack 2, but has a fixed
| (large) selection of libre-licensed modules.
| tibbon wrote:
| I'm both fascinated by notation attempts for modular, and find
| them refreshingly useless.
|
| I've been playing with modular synths for over 25 years. One of
| my favorite parts is the ephemeral nature of patching. A bump of
| a knob or the nature of unsynced elements can quickly make actual
| recall of a larger patch impossible. Due to heat or other
| variability I've had patches change on me over 45 minutes of no
| one touching them. In a world of digital recall and perfection;
| this really speaks to me. Immediacy can be relished. It is now or
| never
| demondemidi wrote:
| I saw Morton Subotnik at my college and he spoke of phase shift
| due to heating of poorly design VCOs in a serendipitous way
| rather than something to be feared.
| motohagiography wrote:
| coincidentally working on a related problem today, which is how
| to find if a procedural sequence of notes can be expressed as a
| function, or if there is a general technique for this.
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