Structure and Meaning

As I walk by a university with its spacious and natural setting, musical chimes ring from a tower. Musical because there are intervals and spaces with high and low notes that make the music seem like a song.

Some music from a historical period was created in the mind of a composer for an audience in the past who were as real as me. An imprint of tracks on the grass with each step. In abstraction, this piece now would be data information coldly extracted from a meaningful piece of music that could be reproduced by a machine in the same likeness along an array of derivatives all in the same stylism of the composer.

Minus, the erratic nature of the human composer to unlearn what it knows to break a structure. A machine trapped within a structure of a coded sequence of instructions, unlike the human composer who walks the line between structured context and chaos, always a stone's throw away from the next piece that could be more meaningful than the last or the habit of humans to create new forms of disciplines and systems.

Alec Empire and Irmin Schmidt, behemoths of German music, share a commonality in world view stretched apart only by the era of their birth. In the article Alec Empire in conversation with Can’s Irmin Schmidt, they observe the effects of a world run by algorithms. A view that would typically resonate with artists and creatives alike (Dax, 2016).

Alec compares the experience of discovering new music with personal compilations rather than “faceless” algorithms that curate music to people based on analyzed habits or patterns (Dax, 2016).

He compares the technology to the gatekeeper that keeps a person from the pursuit of uncharted musical territory. He adds that new software plug-ins like software-based instruments have one repeating musical pattern laid out by computer programmers (Dax, 2016).

Irmin was comparing software plugs in with the experience of traditional analog synthesizers which enables someone to craft new sonic expressions, giving a person complete control to explore new musical contexts that were not present in their contemporary culture and timeline.

References

“Alec Empire in Conversation With Can’s Irmin Schmidt | Telekom Electronic Beats.” Telekom Electronic Beats, 17 Feb. 2016, www.electronicbeats.net/alec-empire-in-conversation-with-cans-irmin-schmidt.