M. Bulteau

Coming back from the dead just to vote on this. The core of any artform is the creative process, and the use of genAI to generate music is anti-process. It focuses instead on the result, and advertises itself as a "facilitator", a "helper", or something to remove the "hassle" of the process. It misses the point that when passion is involved, the creative process is a hassle that one ultimately enjoys. There is no art without passion, and all genAI does is vomit results to the passionless. A creative process comes about through the passionate development of a skill, and it fosters further understanding of said skill. The result is one particular target of a process at a given point in time: it comes about as the inevitable conclusion of a process. This decades-long shift of focus to the result is what makes genAI seem legitimate, because it's the endpoint of a logic that defines art as the object instead of the craft. It's made of the same cloth as the commodification of art, and the reduction of everything to "content." It's a corporate point of view, which can't conceive of art in any other way, and only seeks to expedite what it wrongly perceives to be nothing but a very slow assembly line. I am a composer because I know how to make music, and I learned how to make music by making music. A prompt engineer did not learn how to make an illustration, they learned how to tell a particular machine to do so. One could argue that prompt engineering is a craft, because it isn't absent of human involvement. But where it fails is in never being directly responsible for the result. With genAI, nothing about how to directly reproduce the result is learned because there's no process involved, only instructions by proxy given to a glorified blender. What differentiates genAI from art is the absence of a skillful process directly related to the object. Therefore, the point, and what makes one anything from a hobbyist to an artist, is the process. It just so happens that one cannot go through the process without inevitably coming to a result, which informs more process, and so on and so forth. That's how an artist grows.

I've been working on an opera project with some colleagues for a long while, and some of it requires custom notation. After much discussion, we’ve come up with notation for chromatic/atonal mordents pictured above. These would completely replace the classical mordents we know from the Baroque, since frequent use has made it necessary to always specify the interval at which the ornament is. I would like to know what you think of these, if they seem sensible and functional to you, or not. For vote-counting convenience, please VOTE HERE. If you vote no, please also explain why in a comment. Thank you.

Thanks again, Austenite. I've solved my problem. This thread can be closed now.

Of course! That's where I first heard her, from his piece Ramblings of a Social Network! :facepalm: That's what you get for asking a question at 4 in the morning.

Sharon Rogers. Cooratura soprano. Fresno, California. Anyone know her in any way?

Heh, I'm just posting here because you PM'd me, because I have to tell you I am terrible at this kind of things and I keep forgetting all sorts of rules of counterpoint because I frankly cannot care enough about it. I listen to stuff and if I like it I like it. Nothing more. If you still want me to say something about them, then the voices all sound great to me.

I see Beethoven heavily influences you. I could hear some König Stefan in there, for example. Not in the melodies, because those are all yours and pretty good, but the orchestration and how you build phrases. Nice work!

Haha! I do the same thing! The idea comes to me as I shower, and I keep singing it because I have no other way of remembering until I reach a keyboard. xD Very playful, and I agree that it sounds like a light Beethoven. I like your melodies, man. Keep up!

It is a very strange piece. I am not sure of what to say of it, but it kept my interest in a weird way. By the way, you better make a new recording or correct the section at 05:06, because there's a huge windows error sound bursting through. It scared the scraggy out of me. xD

Why should the first 18 seconds be thrown away? My little devil scherzo starts terribly "typically", and it doesn't make it worse. If that's what he wants as an intro, let him have it. Why should it ALWAYS be original? I think it works fine as a soundtrack. The war-like part is very powerful. Well done.

This isn't marchy enough. Add more sousaphones.