thoughts on electronic music\sound

Ideas are cheap. QUOTE]

i hope you do feel that you uttered a paradox here. the one called self-referential paradox. if ideas are cheap, your idea of them being cheap is cheap too. so it becomes irrelevant.

now back to being as multiple. the theory of being as pure multiple is what followed from trying to avoid self-referential paradoxes. which goes like that - no set is an element of itself. which translates as - there is no whole, because idea of the whole presuposes that it is an element of itself.

on the other hand, ideas are definitely cheap. they don't cost a penny and can be thought by anyone - from complete idiot to a superior genius.

However, the sole purpose of art has never been to create "some new being".

Nor can truth be an index.

What you are saying is you like Mr Sakamoto's work. OK. Say it. Don't bury it in pointless pretention.

And I have to repeat my earlier question. Is this a joke?

You haven't rediscovered the secrets of Baroque counterpoint have you?

i go through this one by one.

yes, the truth of art is creating new things. it is all about invention. or reinvention. it doesn't matter that much. there is no great artist who hasn't invented, reinvented or perfected some ideas, be them musical, plastic or poetical. there is no single artist who does not feel the need to create something non-existant before the creation.

i didn't say that truth was an index, i said an event of truth is an index. which are two different things. event can only be as index because it has nothing to present except his name. and, under this name, in fidelity to the event, there come to be truth procedures - from modern science to love, through politics and art. as such, event is what makes the existing knowledge reshape itself through these procedures.

i didn't say i like ''mr. sakamoto's'' work. actually what i said was that works (some works, two of them, to be precise), in which ''mr. sakamoto'' took participation, were 'new thought in music'. this is of significant difference. you can not draw '=' between concept of novelty and idea of personal taste. nor did i mention that i liked, loved or was amazed by these works. i just outlined thoughts on these musical works. there were no pretention or 'pointlessness'. on the contrary, my point was to illuminate what i meant by the first post.

no, it is not a joke.

baroqueian counterpoint is a musical event, through it music has changed. after the event, which brought, little by little, counterpoint as we know it now, music has never been the same. as is after all musical events - be it the invention of minimalism, twelve tone or any other significant musical enterprise.

and, my last note - if you will not come with anything rational, but instead will indulge in trying to insult me, i won't even try to reply, because the only language that is equal to insults is a language of the street, or, well, boxing. obviously we can not speak it through the internet. so, don't try to mess things up and keep your pseudo-critics intact.

mange takk.

I like me electronic musics.

It gives me wings.

(Just for the record, we don't listen to sine waves, they can't be heard) *whistles*

What?

I'm just saying, this

pure sine wave live and a pure recorded sine wave there is no difference.

just go to the local low-life bar, find the meanest and ugliest guy in there and get into a dog-fight. that will help.

this kind of talk does nothing on the net. do not go trying to insult anyone you don't know.

This is getting a bit too deep and meaningful for me. But I was going to suggest that maybe you need to get out a bit more. Not necessarily a low-life bar but somewhere where you can mingle and forget the philosophy. It is not intended as an insult merely a suggestion.

I'm just saying, this is nonsensical.

Why?

(Just for the record, we don't listen to sine waves, they can't be heard) *whistles*

I'm a bit confused. Are you referring to the fact that technically it's oscillations that we hear, rather than waves? But if you want to get technical then you might as well say that when we're swimming in the ocean, we don't actually feel waves, just oscillations of the water level...

Or something different?

And I second fourthage's "Why?".

This is getting a bit too deep and meaningful for me. But I was going to suggest that maybe you need to get out a bit more. Not necessarily a low-life bar but somewhere where you can mingle and forget the philosophy. It is not intended as an insult merely a suggestion.

as i told you - you don't know anything about my life, so stop making fantasies of your own in regards to me, my life-style or books i read.

or, if you make them, don't draw conclusions that are supposed to be correct.

cause, simply, they aren't.

Why?

Sine functions are how we represent sound. Sound itself doesn't look like a sine function or sound like one either (that would be annoying.). It's uniform in distribution and and uneven in temperament.

What you basically said was that mathematical recording of one sound will be the same of the mathematical output of the same real sound, which is never true. It has to do with natural frequency of each object making a live sound never ever sound like a recorded sound. Even though the mathematical functions may be exactly the same, they won't sound the same.

I'm a bit confused. Are you referring to the fact that technically it's oscillations that we hear, rather than waves? But if you want to get technical then you might as well say that when we're swimming in the ocean, we don't actually feel waves, just oscillations of the water level...

Or something different?

And I second fourthage's "Why?".

No, I'm just referring to the fact that people often confuse the mathematical representation of something for actually being that something.

Sine functions are how we represent sound. Sound itself doesn't look like a sine function or sound like one either (that would be annoying.). It's uniform in distribution and and uneven in temperament.

No, I'm just referring to the fact that people often confuse the mathematical representation of something for actually being that something.

I don't really get it. How would something sound that "sounds like a sine function" then, in your opinion?

Yes, you can call the sine function a "mathematical model of the propagation of sound pressure level changes in space" or something like that, but there's no real difference to, say, a drawn sine function on a piece of graph paper, which technically also just is a "visual representation of a mathematical sine function" and not the function itself, which is abstract. But as you're saying it "doesn't look like a sine function or sound like one", that's apparently not what you mean and you're saying that a sine function does in fact look and sound in a specific way. But how then (well, apart from "annoying" as you say)?

What you basically said was that mathematical recording of one sound will be the same of the mathematical output of the same real sound, which is never true. It has to do with natural frequency of each object making a live sound never ever sound like a recorded sound. Even though the mathematical functions may be exactly the same, they won't sound the same.

The most common way of creating sine tones today are through computers. And the most common way of recording sounds today is digital. If you have a digital sound file in a computer and play it through your speakers, and you have a computer program that creates a sinus tone live and plays it through your speakers these "natural frequencies of the object" (in that case your computer's soundcard, speakers, etc.) will affect both tones to the same degree, so the output should be exactly the same. In both cases, the soundcard receives exactly the same string of numbers at the same tempo which it translates into voltage values and sends to the speakers. I don't see what the acoustic difference would be in such a (very common) case... (unless you're arguing that -no- sound ever sounds exactly like another one, as there are always slight variations in every physical environment, say Brownian motion.)

Some unstated premises here are:

1) that the difference between an "actual" sine wave and an approximation of the sort that you could actually create is truly significant (and audible, since you claim that the sound of a real sine wave would be annoying);

2) that it's actually a problem that we refer to real-world things as mathematical terms. If we were speaking Lojban we might want to make such distinctions, but real languages don't work that way, and I for one don't mind how knobs on most synthesizers are not labeled "sine approximation" and so forth.

I disagree with both of these points, even though you are of course correct in stating that the real world cannot be mapped exactly to mathematical concepts.

I don't really get it. How would something sound that "sounds like a sine function" then, in your opinion?

Yes, you can call the sine function a "mathematical model of the propagation of sound pressure level changes in space" or something like that, but there's no real difference to, say, a drawn sine function on a piece of graph paper, which technically also just is a "visual representation of a mathematical sine function" and not the function itself, which is abstract. But as you're saying it "doesn't look like a sine function or sound like one", that's apparently not what you mean and you're saying that a sine function does in fact look and sound in a specific way. But how then (well, apart from "annoying" as you say)?

Saying that if you record a pure sine wave is nonsense, you don't record abstract functions, you record sound. You do not speak sine waves you speak um sounds. The sine wave is simply a fourier series of the sound and in electronics it's a complex fourier series (thus you don't get pure either way you look at it.)

The most common way of creating sine tones today are through computers. And the most common way of recording sounds today is digital. If you have a digital sound file in a computer and play it through your speakers, and you have a computer program that creates a sinus tone live and plays it through your speakers these "natural frequencies of the object" (in that case your computer's soundcard, speakers, etc.) will affect both tones to the same degree, so the output should be exactly the same. In both cases, the soundcard receives exactly the same string of numbers at the same tempo which it translates into voltage values and sends to the speakers. I don't see what the acoustic difference would be in such a (very common) case... (unless you're arguing that -no- sound ever sounds exactly like another one, as there are always slight variations in every physical environment, say Brownian motion.)

that the difference between an "actual" sine wave and an approximation of the sort that you could actually create is truly significant (and audible, since you claim that the sound of a real sine wave would be annoying);

that it's actually a problem that we refer to real-world things as mathematical terms. If we were speaking Lojban we might want to make such distinctions, but real languages don't work that way, and I for one don't mind how knobs on most synthesizers are not labeled "sine approximation" and so forth.

The point here is that if sound waves were actually sine waves life would be miserable. Think about it, We hold a note and we can keep it even and straight. However, if you look at its sine wave it would be going up and down. If that is what we heard, it would be impossible to to hold notes.

Like I stated before, sound is uniform and and uneven in temperament. Sine functions are uniform and even in temperament though. Sine waves do not reflect SOUND as in what you hear(although they can be used to tell you what you should plan to hear.)

No, drawing a sine function will look like a sine function (although not sound like one, since they have no sound.) Its about algebraic geometry. Interesting field, but anywho, drawing a sine wave will look like a sine wave.

But what then -does- a sine wave look like?

These are all plots of a sine function. Do they look -anything- alike? We can only recognize them as "similar" because we can ignore certain visual parameters about each one and set pairs of other parameters into a relationship to each other, of which we see that it is roughly equivalent to a mathematical sine function. How is that different from sound waves? We look at certain parameters (space, time, air pressure) and see that they stand in a physical relationship that resembles a sine function.

And if sound waves were transversal instead of longitudinal and we looked at the air molecules, they would even -look- like your typical "snake line sine graph".

I agree with you that in our experience, we don't usually hear a sine tone as a "sine wave", because our ears are made for listening to frequencies rather than air pressure levels (they have a built-in fourier transformation machine, so to speak), but then you get to the rather semantical question of "where in the ear you hear". Yes, the signals sent from our ears to our brains are frequency signals and thus have nothing to do with a sine wave, unless we have a sound that actually goes "up and down" like your example suggests. But what arrives in our inner ear are sine waves, even if it's just a straight tone.

And yes, I realise it's never actually going to be an exact mathematical sine wave. But that's the nature of physics after all.

It depends on the speaker doesn't it? The sound you hear from an labtop speaker is not the same as you hear from a movietheater surround sound system. Even though the same input goes in, the physical sound is different.

I don't think the point was whether a sine tone coming from two different systems sounds the same, but whether a recorded sine tone and a synthesised sine tone can sound the same. Which they certainly can, if they are coming from the same machine.

The point here is that if sound waves were actually sine waves life would be miserable. Think about it, We hold a note and we can keep it even and straight. However, if you look at its sine wave it would be going up and down. If that is what we heard, it would be impossible to to hold notes.

Ah, I think we're getting to the point here. It seems the question is whether we're talking about the physical or the psychoacoustic part of "hearing". Physically, what arrives at our ears are sine waves. Psychoacoustically, yes, we -probably- would hear a note that goes up and down more as a "sine" than a straight, overtone-less sound. This however is also relative, as if this "going up and down" in frequency would be fast enough, we'd again start to hear it as a straight tone, now with overtones (that would be frequency modulation). Therefore this distinction is not physical, but biological and depends on the limits of human hearing abilities.

The sine wave is simply a fourier series of the sound and in electronics it's a complex fourier series (thus you don't get pure either way you look at it.)

Sorry to be so blunt, but statements like this leads me to believe that you just don't quite know what you're talking about... The sine wave is a Fourier series of the sound? kthx.

But that aside... are you saying that what we hear when we hear speech, or music, or whatever, is not a pure sine wave? OK, I agree.

On another note:

Physically, what arrives at our ears are sine waves.

Do you mean what arrives at our ears when we listen to sine waves in particular, or when we listen to anything? If the latter... well, I'm not sure. If we see sound here as sound pressure as a function of time, you could certainly do Fourier analysis on any sound and, if you've got enough computational power, synthesize it very well indeed using a bunch of sine waves. But that doesn't mean the sound really is a bunch of sine waves. Just that it can be described as such. And that description can in many cases feel rather contrived. I would think that if we're trying to visualize sound in general as fundamentally made of sine waves, like molecules are made of atoms, we're fooling ourselves.

No, I meant when we're listening to "pure" sine waves. Sound is definitely not always made of sine waves. Sorry for the unclarity there. (Even though the concept of treating the sine wave as the "atom" of music has quite some tradition, with Stockhausen for example. But that's a different thing.)

These are all plots of a sine function. Do they look -anything- alike? We can only recognize them as "similar" because we can ignore certain visual parameters about each one and set pairs of other parameters into a relationship to each other, of which we see that it is roughly equivalent to a mathematical sine function. How is that different from sound waves? We look at certain parameters (space, time, air pressure) and see that they stand in a physical relationship that resembles a sine function.

Anyway You are missing the point. A sine wave is simply the representation of a sound. Sound waves act differently than sine waves. But Sine waves, because we define them to do so, give us information on sine waves, tis all.

what arrives in our inner ear are sine waves

Sorry to be so blunt, but statements like this leads me to believe that you just don't quite know what you're talking about... The sine wave is a Fourier series of the sound? kthx.

Sound is definitely not always made of sine waves.

I don't think the point was whether a sine tone coming from two different systems sounds the same, but whether a recorded sine tone and a synthesised sine tone can sound the same. Which they certainly can, if they are coming from the same machine.

That's part of my point. That's why a recorded sound won't be the same as a live sounded produced by the actual instruments on a live stage.

I'm not saying that when we hear any sound that what arrives at our ears are sine ways. This is in fact merely a matter of defining every periodic waveform as a sum of superimposed sine waves. However, if we have a more or less pure sine tone then it's not a "jaggy looking piece of scraggy" that we have to run through a fourier transfromation to get a sine wave. If you look at it in an oscilloscope (which can't do fourier transformations) it already "looks like a sine wave". And while you won't find such tones in nature, you can get pretty close to it with certain instruments, recorders for example.

If you have a computer calculate the sine of the current time at short time intervals and have it translate these numbers into voltage values (possibly after sending it through a lowpass filter), these voltage values will rise and fall proportional to a sine wave. And if you send these voltages to a speaker, the membrane will oscillate sinusoidally. And the air particles in front of that speaker will adopt this movement. And this sinusoidal oscillation will spread in space at about 340 m/s. And a bit later the air particles near your eardrum will start to oscillate sinusoidally. And then your eardrum. Etc.

And yes, I realize that "sound wave" and "sine wave" are different terms. They describe different aspects of a wave. "Sound wave" basically merely designates the medium (air) and that it is a longitudinal wave. "Sine wave" designates the specific waveform in the case of, well, a sine tone. (Again: I've never said every sound is a sine tone or even a sum of sine tones.) But if, as you say, "sound waves act differently than sine waves" can you describe what then does a sound wave generated by a sine tone generator "acts like"? If you could describe the physical properties of sound waves as you see them I'd be more likely to get your point.

P.S. There isn't really anything superimposed about those sine functions I posted. They are just various mixtures of polar and cartesian coordinates, 3d graphics, and colour as a measurement of "deflection". "r=sin(Θ)" is just as much a sine graph as "x=sin(y)", yet they look entirely different. My point was just that arguing that something doesn't look/sound "like a sine wave" is technically pointless since a sine wave has no defined visual or acoustical appearance.

Oh, and:

That's part of my point. That's why a recorded sound won't be the same as a live sounded produced by the actual instruments on a live stage.

You argued that a recorded sine tone and a sine tone produced live can't sound the same. I argued that they can, if they come from the same machine. "Actual instruments on a live stage" are besides the point, unless those instruments can also record sound, like a computer.

Number 1: yes one is superimposed. You see a circle and then you see waves extending from the center, superimposed.

Number 2: No I am not arguing that sine tone produced lice can't sound the same. I am arguing that we don't hear loving SINE WAVES. We do not listen to SINE waves, we listen to SOUND waves, and we represent that through SINE waves. I further the statement that even though two objects may have the SAME sine wave, they do not have to produce the same SOUND. What is so damn hard about that loving concept?

Number 3: Sound has physical properties, SINE waves do not. It's asinine to think otherwise.

There's a homework assignment I gave to demonstrate that point. I make my students write functions describing sound wave movements and compare it to sine wave movements and note the differences.

Side note about using oscilloscope. I'm not sure what kind you use, but um they generally have a FFT function already built it =-0!

Another side note, you obviously misunderstood what looks like a sine wave means to a mathematician. Regardless of how it actually looks, as long as it holds the fundamental definition of sine waves, then it looks like one. The actual visual doesn't mean anything to me, I can look at numbers and say, for that period it can be a sine wave.

Number 1: That circle is just the unit circle and part of the coordinate system, not the actual graph.

Number 2: My only claim is that sound waves can be sinusoidal. "Sound wave" says nothing about the actual form of the wave. A sound wave can have any form. Calling a specific sound wave a "sine" just describes the particular character of this sound wave. Is our fundamental misunderstanding that I am willing to accept "sine wave" as a characteristic of a specific wave, whereas you treat it exclusively as an isolated entity? And I'd love to hear examples of two sounds that have the same sine wave but sound differently...

Number 3: I liked your pun with "asinine". :D But I'm not saying a sine wave per se has physical properties, but that it can itself be a physical property. Namely of very specific sound waves.

I'd -love- to hear the results of these homework that describe the differences between sine waves and sound waves. I'm still interested in hearing an explanation/description/formula of what the sound wave of a "sine tone" actually "looks like".

Concerning the oscilloscope: Maybe there are oscilloscopes with built-in FFT algorithms, but that's not really the point of an oscilloscope, is it? You need a FFT for a spectroscope, or a sonogram, not for a wave-form view (well, I'm sure you'll disagree on that again)...

Number 1 the first circle is part of the graph and the rest are possible graphs with different r values. The wave coming out of the center is the superimpose function.

Number 2-Two sounds that have the same sound wave but sound differently. Go into matlab and write a code (I would give it to you, but I can't find the data file right now) for high pass filter meant to operate under a sea barrier whose bode plots fades at 60. Run the sound through two different amplifiers. =-o then record those sounds. Note, same sine wave give the orders for the sound but when you look at the recording, two different fourier transformers occur.

Number 3-No a sine wave is not a physical property, it describes physical property.

It's simple really. Look at the position function of a sine wave that describes a sound wave and then look at the actually position of the function. Tis the difference.

I use my oscill for Potential Difference, and as I recall, they generally automatically plot the pd as a function of time or voltage thus most to all oscill will do a FFT. If you use yours differently fine, but it isn't my concern.

*addresses #3*

"Sine wave" is purely psychological. Just like "F#"...yes?

*waits like a hungry puppy for affirmation* :ermm: