This is especially key for organic sounding drums and percussion and it’s where drum synths have an advantage over samples. I can be a bit surprised what the AR throws at me sometimes, which is a pro far more often than a con!
To me an organic sounding instrument is (kind of what it says on the tin) one that sounds more alive. A combination of movement and unpredictabality. Soma’s Lyra-8 is a good example of this which led to them referring to it as ‘organismic’ which people seem to often misinterpret/misread.
There’s VST’s where you can have a large pool of say, snare hits and it chooses a different sample randomly for each hit. It can sound very much like a real drummer. Then again now with most pop music, even if played with real instruments is quantized in a DAW most people don’t really hear the difference anymore.
True I should have specified one-shots I guess as it’s less about it being sample based. And I think you’d be right in saying that using that technique would make the drums sound more ‘organic’.
Think of a person sitting in a chair. To approximate that with a simple robot you may have a completely stationary object accurately representing the shape and form of a human. But the human has all kinds of nuance, their heart is beating, their temperature is changing, they shuffle, twitch and occasionally surprise themselves with a fart. You can start to replicate some of that with the robot but it’s a lot of work and it won’t convince everyone, and none of its farts are a surprise.
Binary and quantization play nicely together - from an information perspective it is possible to perfectly represent quantum states with binary notation. Continuous values, such as real numbers, can only be approximated by binary notation.
If you want to be rigorous, the most you can say is that at the smallest measurable scales physics is accurately described by a quantum model. We don’t know how things “truly are”, we know what we can measure and we know the limits of our measurements.
It is possible to build computational systems within a physical world (proof: you are using a physical computer right now). It is also possibly to build arbitrarily accurate physical simulations within a computational world (examples: Minecraft is a very low resolution simulation of a physical world. Nuclear fusion research depends on high resolution computational physics models).
My own opinion is that since we can simulate physics computationally and we can do computation physically, it isn’t possible to prove whether one or the other is more real. In other words, our apparently physical world could be a video game running in “God’s” computer and we may never be able to tell.
Cutting edge physics operates at the limits of measurement, so you can drive a dump truck full of woo through the gaps if you really want to.
As far as music is concerned, there isn’t any value in working with a resolution that comes close to the “diameter” of an atom. Modeling quarks might be fun, and might generate interesting data streams that could be used musically, but Newtonian physics should be more than sufficient for modeling the interaction between sound and the human ear.
It’s an interesting thought but in the end quite meaningless. I mean, what’s the point of calling our reality a simulation or a video game? The distinction doesn’t change anything and surely terms such as video game or computer are meaningless at the scale we’re talking about. Theoretically sure you could decide a set of criteria of what makes a computer or a video game and apply them to reality or the universe or w/e, but does it really mean anything? It’s just taxonomy.
That’s exactly my point - if you want to hit the bong and imagine worlds within worlds, then go right ahead. But unless you can open a communication channel to the world that our world is encapsulated within, it’s just amusing speculation.
Ah, sorry your post was quite complex and I maybe don’t quite understand how it relates to my musings earlier.
For any practical purpose, totally. But I am very intrigued by quantum biology in general. Sadly we don’t really have any practical way of studying the effects on quantum phenomena inside the human body, but I bet in the future this field will give us totally new insight into how our bodies work.
I thought “organic” meant “grown with the help of products that haven’t killed bees nor should kill yourself when you eat it” or something.
Acoustic sound, I get it.
But organic is the kind of vague word that everyone can use with their own meaning, in the context of sound. So yeah, bollocks as was said.
I totally disagree that words on bottles are bollocks. I’ve been introduced to wine tasting and can affirm that while industrial marketing descriptions are most of the time bollocks, in the other hand words used by producers (“Récoltant” on the cork paper) correspond to a precise vocabulary of taste description, in general.
Just a term. Nothing is organic unless there is living matter involved. Hence, what would sound “organic” would be highly subjective. The totally unscientific description I can think of would be stuff that are not “thin”, not “metallic”, not “cold” and not “FM”. How about we switch to say sounds that “resonates with me” - would that create less ambiguity (but equal amount of subjectivity)?
If you want to go down the scientific path, a more accurate definition of “organic” is “involving carbon chains”. “Life” and “living” aren’t well defined, but we have a lot of examples of carbon-based life, so it is easier to dodge the question and say “its organic if it involves carbon” which is what Organic Chemists do. The popular / consumer definition of organic is nearly the opposite of the scientific definition. But it’s also commonly understood that “food without chemicals” doesn’t mean a hard vacuum (since all edible matter is made of chemicals), but does mean food without harmful chemicals. Humans are very good at dealing with informal, imprecise and even contradictory definitions.
Metals have strong and rigid bonds, so they tend to transmit vibrations (and thus sound) efficiently. Carbon chains are ropey little things that tend to bond weakly but stickily to each other. Woods and plastics will resonate. A blob of oil won’t resonate as well. Amusingly, FM is great from moving down the spectrum of resonating metals to resonating woods and plastics.
I chased “organic” sounds in VAs for some time before I realized that the sounds I was looking for were much more easily produced with even a 4-op FM synth.
Pride in having read a Phil101 book is valid I guess!
Tangentially related-
I enjoyed the small gawking at the culture discussed here, but I get negative excitement from discussing that specific take in my old age, it’s so rarely used in new contexts beyond brain in a vat.
I’d hope life was more entertaining if I was watching a hologram projection of day to day existence!
Sound wise, it’s all subjective. But to my ear unless it’s a string, skin of block sending sound waves though the air it doesn’t sound “organic”. To me organic in musical context would mean exquisite order or patterns arrived at randomly. There would be a yielding to something fundamental, upon which the supplemental would grow and evolve. In this sense it describes electronic music production well, if not a finished song then the process of producing a original song, as opposed to reproduction of pop music; applying a formula to adhere to genre; not as creative; organic.
I would say organic music would not be boring, like pop music has a tendency to be. Not to speak about quality, just the state of homogenization in the music that defines “pop”.
Hmm, I don’t really think it is. It’s definitely about tiny imperfections, or randomness of harmonics. I mean I bet if you play a series of 4 hits, each exactly same versus 4 hits, each subtly different to each other, most if not all who can hear the difference would say the latter is more organic.
