You've changed the subject completely. It's a wrong strategy, sorry.

What the music is?

From what you know what the music is?

Isn't typical bubblegum pop song a piece of music? Can these songs influence somebody? Do I have to know this genre to be able to compose bubblegum pop songs? Don't I have to listen to them to be able to compose them? Do you see an influence in such a case?

Cannot music be primitive and complex, good and bad, interesting and tedious, deep and stupid, etc., etc., etc.?

If any composition is primitive this isn't music?

If you don't like this composition this isn't music?

If you haven't heard something does that mean that nobody have heard it and this music have influenced nobody at all?

 

I always start with a piano and write a chord progression and melody, this way you aren't distracted by what sounds to use etc. One I have that I then spread out the notation across different instruments, so each voice in the chord can be played by a different instrument for harmony etc.

 

First it depends. Movie, Commercial, Music, etc...
The simple one i give you and that is the creation of techno or other electronic music.
This is my secret (my name is not victoria lol)
4 bars, 8, 16, etc.
You LOOP.
You get the total picture in those bars/frames.
You mute, check out other synths, and make an LOOP within the bars.
When finished and satisfied, do a copy paste.
So like if you want your song to be 4-5 minutes, copy the whole (say 16 tracks) and set the loop on the end.
Then you can cut, mute, remove, add stuff.
That's how you i do Electronic Music.

1. Create all shit in a loop including climax
2. Copy paste how long you want the song to be
3. Cut, remove, mute, add as needed.

 

I thought the clip of Martyn Bennett composing was interesting also for the the fact that it is or was used by the Scottish education system in secondary schools as part of their exam preparation it shows that the sampling approach is being taken seriously by the educational powers that be rather than using the traditional classical theory based method only which used to be the case when I was at school (aeons ago)I remember being bored shitless with the music classes though I still loved music.If they had made the classes feel more relevant to the music I and my contemporaries were actually listening to at the time it would have been so much more interesting.

 

There is a common perspective that knowledge enables wisdom, but only when that knowledge is used.

Which technically means nobody (self-included) is using their knowledge gained however great or small because they are posting on a forum instead of playing.

Have fun people.

 

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And that, my friends, is what passes as "composition" in 2020.

 

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I tend to follow what the success stories of leaders in their respective fields have to say. While they are not always right, they tend to be more in touch with reality than most forums. Most of the intelligent people I know also tend to think similarly.

Spoiler

A forum is only a place for discussion and opinion. If anyone thinks that what they read in a forum is the gospel truth, then they seriously are better off believing corner store rags that say their mother was an alien.

 

Oh Master... You do so masterfully present us with paradoxes.
Maybe this is another one of your now legendary "The opposite of what I said was actually intended" quotes.
Oh Master... in wrestling with your riddle, I humbly dare to consider another way...
If may be so bold as to make some tiny adjustments to your masterful quote...

Almost everyone that actually contributes something real to this thread
does NOT think they are any kind of master,
and does NOT think their methods are the only ways to be considered.

It seems to me like the actual contributors are simply enjoying sharing and reading about the "What works for you" ideas.
And the wonderfully constructive part of that is discovering just how diverse all those ideas are.
I'm having a range of reactions to what I'm reading...
I might think... "Great, that's really interesting"
or I might think... "Great that this works for you, doubt if I'll get much out of that myself, but will definitely 'give it a go' just to see what happens"
There's a lot of creativity to be found in actually trying something that you think probably won't work for you, and then seeing where your creative recovery from failure can lead you.

I have been placing (totally sincerely felt) 'likes' on comments where the methods described are nothing like I would ordinarily pursue myself. This is because it is genuinely interesting to see how people actually do it.

Still waiting (without holding my breath) for anything real from @Lager in that regard.

I haven't seen anything at all to feel cynical about here except the off-side nihilistic sniping.
But even that silly sniping just makes me laugh more than feeling cynical. I laugh mostly at its self-defeating irrelevance.

 

This century for some reason seems to have more people immediately heading for the negatives in anything rather than first looking for anything that may be positive. The days of people thinking that someone else may have a valid point even if they do not agree with them are few and far between. As a side example, the recent 'Rise of Skywalker', the final film in a 42 year saga was negatively attacked immediately with very few positives. Part of me wanted to say 'How does anyone finish a 42-year saga successfully that will please everyone that has ever watched it? You can't". But it would have been a complete waste of energy.

It is good to question anything. But to negate everything? While some people say they feel pity at this latter attitude, I found it is healthier for me just to think that it works for them but I do not have to take it onboard.
We now live in a population globally heading towards 8 billion people.

In a perfect world, we would all look for as you said: "Great, this is really interesting". But this world is less like that than it has ever been now. We are now in the age of instant gratification and for some people that want it now now now, anything less just gets all the negatives. Patience always has been and for me always will be a virtue.

So back to composing, I stand by what I answered to "How do you compose?" - with my imagination and any tool that enables that imagination to become a reality.
Regards.

 

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I promise this mini rant is 100% relevant to explaining why thousands of arguments (everywhere) are misguided,
including many of the weird disagreements in music forums, and, of course, in this thread.

It involves a tiny bit of armchair philosophy.
It describes an idea that is SIMPLE, IMPORTANT, and SADLY NEGLECTED.
So please read it (I can just hope).
At the end I hope you feel that it is very relevant to thinking about many discussions,
including, for example, some of the nice music related questions that @Ibnv asked in this comment.

So, my rant - in two parts...
Part a) A simple philosophy idea (no mention of music, just some basic important ideas)
Part b) The idea applied to music arguments

Part a) A simple philosophy idea (ultra simple version - philosophers please give me a break!)
There are two very different kinds of facts in our world...
1) brute facts (and with these our opinions do not matter!)
2) personal/social facts (and with these our opinions are the only things that matter)

Notice I will always refer to (alleged) facts because we're rarely sure about things.

Examples

(alleged) Brute fact: "Gravity doesn't work on Sundays"
Imagine we are arguing about this. I say it's true, You say it's false. Your smart move is to invite me to step off a building on Sunday morning and find out what happens. i.e., do the reality check.
There 'really is' a right answer and a wrong answer here, and our lofty opinions are just totally irrelevant. The only thing that matters is do your beliefs align well with what reality dictates. Notice how 'agreeing to disagree' in this situation is just a pathetic cop-out, typically motivated more by misguided virtue-signalling, instead of the far more important issue of getting at the truth, and revealing the facts of the matter.

(alleged) Personal/social fact: "Strawberry tastes better than chocolate"
Imagine we are arguing about this. You say it's true, I say it's false. There is NO reality check that can resolve this. The entire concept of whether something tastes good, bad, better, worse, is entirely in our heads. There is no universally correct answer. In this context 'agree to disagree' is the only option, and therefore the wisest and most civilised option. We can of course still play politics and try to change each other's opinions, that's OK. But what we cannot do is claim that either of us is 'right'. You cannot appeal to a higher authority, like reality, for arbitration, Reality just says "It's in your heads - you sort it out for yourself"

Part b) The idea applied to music arguments

Examples

(alleged) Brute fact: "Beethoven's music is more complex than Bubblegum pop music".
Let the musical engineers do their job. They can dismantle the music and they will show you in quantifiable terms how the rhythms are more complex, the melodies are more complex, the harmonies are more complex, the structure is more complex. Beethoven just IS more complex than Bubblegum. Note how, the personal opinions of the musical academic do not matter, and the personal opinions of the teenage raver do not matter. There is a right answer here which you can find from empirical analysis. Beethoven IS more complex than Bubblegum pop. We say "that's a brute fact!"
If you personally cannot see the fact, then you need to do a reality check and change your beliefs.

But now here's an example of stuff that people find really hard to swallow...

(alleged) Personal/social fact: 'Complexity is a necessary feature of good music'
Bite the bullet here, recognise that we are back in strawberry versus chocolate land. Words like necessary and good in this context smell suspiciously like opinions. Go to the teenage party and watch them listening to Bubblegum pop. Try telling them that Beethoven is good and Bubblegum is crap. Be prepared to be laughed at and thrown out, because they know that Bubblegum tastes better than Beethoven.

You can now feel desperately defensive and convince yourself that 'your opinions are superior' and that it is your duty to have a political mission and educate these foolish teenagers, give them the benefits of your wisdom and change their minds. The merits of that mission are open to debate, but what you absolutely cannot do is say that you are universally right.
You cannot say that Beethoven actually really tastes better than Bubblegum.
There is no reality check to support that entirely personal opinion.

--

So, there is really is a subtle but hugely important difference between statements like...

1) "Bach is more complex than Bieber"
We might not know whether that's true or false but we know what type of statement it is.
It is an alleged brute fact, we should do the reality check and find out (for real) whether that claim is correct or not.
A right answer 'really' is available (even if we can't actually find it)

2) "Complexity matters in music"
This is an alleged personal/social fact - you have to agree to disagree if necessary, or argue to change each other's opinions,
but don't be stupid enough to claim that there is a universally correct answer.

If we don't carefully recognise that these two statements are entirely different species of argument then we make fools of ourselves.

See how utterly misguided it is to mash these two very separate things together and end up with a contentious statement like
"Bach's music is better than Bieber's because it's more complex"
- You end up feeling right because 'yes Bach really is more complex'
- But you actually have no grounds for feeling correct because 'whether complexity is relevant or not' is an entirely subjective opinion.

In general, when we get muddled about these issues, we make one or other of these truly ridiculous mistakes...
We claim our opinions are all that matter, even when clearly right and wrong answers do exist!
or vice versa
We arrogantly claim we have the right answers even when right answers don't exist and our opinions are all that matter, and should be respected, even when mutually opposed.

Once you see how all of the above works, you find it going on everywhere around you, like some grand comedy of errors. People arguing pointlessly and hopelessly because they haven't taken the trouble to figure out what kind of issue is actually being argued about.

I leave @Ibnv's quote as a nice case study. He raises some very nice questions, and I claim that it would be foolish to try to answer any of them without considering what I described above, carefully, for each of his questions in turn.

 

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There is a lot of logic here. In nearly six decades, I have found that until people accept that being different is only being different and that the labels of better or worse have no place there, nothing changes. Perhaps not in my time.

John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics could do ridiculous figures in his head that only computers could as could Alan Turing.
In both cases they were bullied as being fools because they could not grasp simple social or emotional intelligence and in Turing's case they thought he needed psychiatric help because he was gay.
They were only different to average Joe. It did not stop the world using their skills and they were used.

So everything you have listed while making perfect sense, comes down to interpretation from one person to another, what is easy for one may be difficult for another, and vice-versa.

 

While I do like the feeling behind your comments, there is one way in which they might contain a significant error.
Your sentence...
"So everything you have listed while making perfect sense, comes down to interpretation from one person to another"
That implies (unless I read it incorrectly) that 'Ultimately, everything is just a personal interpretation'.

My disagreement with that is very subtle but very significant.
I believe it totally contradicts a fundamental point made in my post.

While I agree that ALL of our discussions do come down to just personal interpretations
that should absolutely NOT imply that everything about the real world is 'just a matter of personal interpretation'.

Please see how radically different those two things are. (our discussions of the real world versus the real world itself)

That would be the gigantic error of assuming that our world is ALL just personal/social facts
when in reality, there just are brute facts that are not influenced in any way by the hubris of human interpretations.
A desire to see everything as always just open to interpretation, so that we can, always, all just agree to disagree, without facing reality, is not a wise way of looking at the world. It is actually a delusion. It is just a falsely comforting way of looking at the world, and reality will reliably bight back at such delusions.

---

p.s., after you included my quote I had to go back and repair a really major typo error - see if you can spot it
but my post is now corrected.
Cheers

 

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Is not the English language a many misinterpreted thing?

I suppose in one area I could be chastised for not being completely succinct. Then again, we all fall under the hammer of not always being perfectly clear.

My meaning was that while I got it, not everyone will. I do not want to digress from the main topic too much, so in short, I believe that if I was incorrect, then the polar opposite of cult45 to every other voter on the same topics being drastically seen differently, would not exist.
Being in academia, there are no brute facts. As one tiny example the invention of radio which I have mentioned before. Anyone that thought Marconi may not have invented radio was considered a fool and ignoring brute fact. When the only fact was that Tesla patented radio before Marconi did.

There are no brute facts, only temporary proof. It is like trying to provide a one-size-fits-all for composition. It does not exist except for some people but not all. While it may be considered a fact for one group it is not for another. Like I have also mentioned on another thread, most people consider that the sun will rise tomorrow is a brute fact when the only fact is it is temporary proof until the sun explodes.
You can call it semantics and to a point that is correct. I would be more likely to reach brute fact saying I have just posted now and the moment I click save, the present becomes past tense.

EDIT: What I consider brute fact is something that cannot possibly be changed by any source and is irrefutable and cannot be countered by any argument, alternative or opinion. It cannot be debated in any possible way nor will ever change.
Very few of those exist. The only one I know is that any organic creature will eventually die unless immortality is discovered.

 

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Yes we are way off topic, but my earlier post was not, and so I will respond to defend the validity of what I said there.

Jokey but serious answer first... Is what you said above a fact?
If it is then it can't be. If it's not then why should I take it seriously?
Like it or not - The statement: "There are no brute facts" is an incoherent logical contradiction.
Favoured only amongst discredited post modern sociologists.

No time now, but the disagreement does (obviously) hinge on different uses of the word 'fact'
and not unpacking the important ideas that lurk behind that deceptively simple word.
Here are a few sentences that would lead to disambiguating (but I've no time to elaborate further right now)

There is a huge difference between using the word fact in the following ways... (but all of them valid)

A fact is a 'state of affairs' a 'way the world just is'
A fact is not measured by true versus false; it is just something that either is or is not.
A fact is something that the universe either has created (it is real) or has not created (does not exist)

A statement of fact is an entirely different animal from a fact
A statement of fact is a human construction, it is an assertion that might be true or it might be false.

Look at your sentence "There are no brute facts, only temporary proof." That actually makes no sense while discussing facts
but it makes perfect sense when rewritten as something like...
"There are no 100% reliable statements of fact, only temporary confidences about what we currently believe is true or false"

You said... "Is not the English language a many misinterpreted thing?"
Absolutely right. But the solution is never to end up arguing over what the words mean or don't mean.
The solution is always to unpack and clearly identify the concepts. The words are just tools to help us do that.
So, for example, it would be tedious to argue over how we use the word fact in our day to day dialogue.
It is far more important to distinguish between two very different concepts like fact versus statement of fact in the way I tried to do above.

 

Its a fruitless exercise to debate whether or not something is fact because that dictates an argument and it is as you said unrelated to the topic because basically, a fact is a thing that is known to be consistent with objective reality and can be proven to be true with evidence. For example, "this sentence contains words" is a linguistic fact, and "the sun is a star" is a cosmological fact. In contemporary philosophy, a brute fact is a fact that has no explanation. ... To reject the existence of brute facts is to think that everything can be explained. ("Everything can be explained" is sometimes called the principle of sufficient reason).

I knew this but I was parroting some of the above (and owning that) because I could not be bothered typing it all out and also, so I could see if I was wrong. Nah.
Evidence changes (can be superseded)and I proved that with radio earlier. Everything must change as the song goes.
Have fun.

 

Good quote from wikipedia,you are so knowledgable in music stuff, total giant, but... if you actually listen to the damn song, it is totally a medley (it is called a "suite" in the wikipedia page of the song, which is basically the same thing, but real suites are way more related stylistically).
Let's use your own sources for more information:
"A suite, in Western classical music and jazz, is an ordered set of instrumental or orchestral/concert band pieces. It originated in the late 14th century as a pairing of dance tunes and grew in scope to comprise up to five dances, sometimes with a prelude, by the early 17th century. The separate movements were often thematically and tonally linked" (compare to BR)

""Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. It is a six-minute suite,[1] ("more like a medley, imo") consisting of several sections without a chorus: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda.[2] "

It is from an album, called: "A Night at the Opera" - nah, it is totally not supposed to be a medley/suite/whatever you call it.

 

@Thunoing Thumbs, You said... "Its a fruitless exercise to debate whether or not something is fact because..."
That is astonishing! That partial sentence is already nonsensical even before you make any attempt to complete it,
and when you actually completed it it just became even more confused.
It absolutely IS (ALWAYS) worth identifying whether something is a (brute) fact that human opinions don't affect or a personal/social fact that is subject to mere opinions. The difference is CRUCIAL.

And your subsequent list of example 'statements of fact' is just irrelevant padding, it doesn't change the validity of what I just wrote above at all, not one bit! And then the rambling about how facts change (well dah, of course they do!) is also completely irrelevant to the main points that you should have addressed but didn't.

And so after all of the above we have...

I claim several things...

1. that there is a HUGE and important conceptual difference between a fact and a statement of fact (have you seen that yet?)
2. that your comment "There are no brute facts, only temporary proof" is completely false, and was just your misguided confusion. The statement can only be rescued by very clearly distinguishing between fact and statement of fact. I gave you a sane alternative with "There are no 100% reliable statements of fact, only temporary confidences about what we currently believe is true or false"
3. that your misguided comment "There are no brute facts..." was motivated by a personal preference to see the world as 'Ultimately, everything is just a personal interpretation'. which I still want to very strongly dispute, because I seriously believe that this way of looking at the world is a toxic debilitating idea (in all walks of life)

Now, maybe I misread what beliefs actually motivate you? But the sentence, from you, that I started with was
"So everything you have listed while making perfect sense, comes down to interpretation from one person to another"

I would still like to hear your crystal clear statement about what you actually believe about this.
i.e., (brute) facts versus social/personal facts - do you understand and acknowledge the important difference between the two or are you actually still in the 'Ultimately, everything is just a personal interpretation' camp? (which I personally regard as an asylum)

At the end of your last comment you made a remark that simply says "so I could see if I was wrong. Nah."
But where were you NOT wrong?
First you said "There are no brute facts..." and when I challenged that, you then just borrowed a wiki quote..
"To reject the existence of brute facts is to think that everything can be explained".
What should I now think? Should I 'guess' that this means you have actually changed your mind and now agree that Brute Facts do exist? or have you just pasted something that sounds good? without even noticing that it totally contradicts what you previously said?
So, what do you actually believe? What do you think? NOT what does Wiki say?

Now I will say where I went (unimportantly) wrong. I allowed myself to borrow the adjective brute when describing facts. That was an unnecessary embellishment (but one that did not change the validity of the argument one bit) My comments would actually be more accurate and broader, and even more significant if I just stuck with the word fact instead of brute fact. I used the word brute fact just to help distinguish them from personal/social facts. (it's harder to emphasise that distinction if I used just the word fact) And I was also concerned that the important concept fact could and probably would be confused with the other important concept statement of fact. And your comments, so far, have demonstrated that my concerns were correct there.

So, it doesn't actually matter whether I say fact or brute fact. I used the word brute fact just to emphasise just one really important idea, the idea that facts are NOT something that depend on human opinions. That is still the big idea here, and one that I'm still not sure you agree with. I suspect it's an idea you just don't like or just don't want to acknowledge the truth of.

An accusation: Sometimes I think you seem to just prefer wriggling around the concepts instead of nailing them down and stating what you really believe. Please show me I'm wrong about that. At the end of the day I don't care really about any prestige-preserving manouvres in your dialogue, just as long as the ACTUAL MAIN IDEAS stay in focus
And those main ideas are...

• The universe has been generating and changing facts for at least 14 billion years, and for almost all of that time humanity did not even exist. Only for an unimaginably short blip in that 14 billion years has humanity been mature enough to generate (tentative) beliefs about facts or express (tentative) statements about facts. But the facts have never cared about what humanity thinks and they never will.
• Human beings, especially sociologists and poor quality post modern academics, have managed to delude themselves into thinking that the world of human interpretations is all that matters, and that there are no real facts. This astonishing hubris is based on (at least) two things.

1. a totally deluded confusion over the difference between a fact and a belief about a fact (or a statement of fact)
2. a pathetically deluded desire to elevate humanity to a status whereby humanity's opinions about facts matter more than the facts themselves. Some demented members of our species still think we are the important center of the universe.

​

So, with all the above clarifications in place, (stuff that I deliberately did not bother cluttering up the original post with),
why not go back to my original post that talks about one important idea...
the idea that us distinguishing between brute facts and person/social facts really does matter and that we get hopelessly confused every time we fail to notice the distinction.
Your comments have, so far, been providing unfortunate evidence that I'm right about that.

Please tell me (clearly) if and where that idea in my original post falls apart - and I will sincerely thank you for the enlightenment.

By all means throw away the superfluous word 'brute'. Doing so, actually strengthens the points I was making, but getting rid of the word 'brute' just makes it a bit less obvious that there's a huge difference between facts that are independent of human opinions and personal/social facts that are utterly dependent on human opinions.

Then, please notice how that simple important idea applies to every music argument we ever have, and please tell me clearly if and how you think that is not relevant.

But please be clear, direct and specific, if and when you dismantle the arguments in my post. Comments that merely allude to wiser perspectives are no substitute for robust counter arguments, so let's not bother with any more of those.

====

p.s., You said "Have Fun"
That good advice is well received and graciously accepted. Writing is learning, and learning really is fun.

 

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Logical. Why debate something when you call it fact? There is no margin for debate unless new evidence comes to light because it is fact.
To repeat, when it is superseded. Completely logical.

The only one wriggling is you, I get mine across in brief sentences. I also acknowledge a different point of view. You require long-winded multi=paragraphs. I do not because I work in an area that requires what you keep trying to define as fact. You really assume Ido not know the difference between belief, opinion and fact. Assumption is the mother of all screwups.
Who are you trying to convince? Yourself? Exhausting.
What you have stated is an opinion as is everyone else's on this forum.
My previous post did contain direct quotes (As I said that I parroted) from encyclopaedias and academic journals.
Try it on someone that does not know any better.
Bye
I was specific.