Non-Linear Music

[version]

Mark Fell's talked about his dislike of the linear/horizontal timeline and workflow in standard music software, which is why he opts to use stuff like Max/MSP, but is genuinely non-linear music possible? Something like drone seems the closest we can get to it, but even that has slight variations and runs the length of a given timeline.

Isn’t your Sensate Focus material an exploration of what you can do with presets, or the ‘recognisable’ sounds that repeat themselves throughout club music history to a certain extent?
Fell: Sensate Focus was really about my difficulty with timeline editing environments. Most of what I do is not done in DAWs like Logic or Pro Tools where you have time going along an axis and you draw notes in. I can’t actually work with those environments. I think it’s some kind of neurological disorder that I’ve got, a bit like dyslexia where I just cannot function in that environment. I find it painful and horrible. So the Sensate Focus stuff was me deciding to do something in that environment that is the most structurally convoluted stuff you could possibly do.
For example, the Sensate Focus material doesn’t adhere to a 4/4 grid. So, just to loop things and work out where things start and end is an actual nightmare. I was doing that in order to think about the narrative structures that are present in house music, but also the sounds as well. It’s not just about sound though, it’s equally about doing a musical analysis of those structures, without trying to sound too sort of grandiose. Ultimately it’s just meant to sound good.
How exactly were you working in the DAW?
Fell: All those records are done completely in a timeline, just with the pencil tool drawing individual notes in and then cutting and pasting notes. So there are no Max/MSP-based automated processes, there’s no playing in real time. It’s all just a pencil tool drawing a note in. Like I said, each loop wasn’t a 4/4 structure that was divided into 16 equal bits. So there are all these unusual loop ends and timing divisions within the loops, which made it quite torturous to edit, but I liked the idea of what would come out of the music. What would the music end up being like if the process is as unpleasant as possible and as cognitively difficult as possible? Some of them are not as successful as others, but there’s one or two moments in that series that I think worked really well.

There's a Oneohtrix Point Never interview where he talks about having made "vertically dense" music in the past, but ultimately it's still operating on the horizontal axis, runs for a fixed period of time and goes from Point A to Point B. It seems impossible to escape.

"I've made vertically dense music in the past, and I more or less decided to do a record where I would flip that axis over this way [horizontally] and just excavate. So now I have a plane—a horizontal plane with very particular musical objects, in almost like a tableaux format."

There's such a thing as nonlinear acoustics, but the non-linearity seems to be down to the equations underpinning them rather than them actually being able to swerve the timeline altogether in the way I'm talking about.

You also get "non-linear" music in video games, but that seems to be a case of arranging sections and elements in such a way that they can be inserted according to something other than the timeline whilst ultimately still operating on it.

 

[version]

What the Flip is Non-Linear Music? - https://www.polygon-treehouse.com/blog/2018/10/24/what-the-flip-is-non-linear-music

 

[entertainment]

If we're talking strictly aural pleasure, then time is an essential parameter because of the psychology of expectation. So music that exists outside of time would have to be a different thing, like you could say that it's interesting or something, but it would be incommensurable with classic music discourse about it being good or not.

So it would be a new thing, but it does sound interesting.

 

[mvuent]

http://divergencepress.net/2013/03/...imalist-music-tom-johnsons-an-hour-for-piano/

When I first entered the concert, I listened linearly. But I soon exhausted the information content of the work. It became totally redundant. For a brief period I felt myself getting bored, becoming imprisoned by a hopelessly repetitious piece. Time was getting slower and slower, threatening to stop.

But then I found myself moving into a different listening mode. I was entering the vertical time of the piece. My present expanded as I forgot about the music’s past and future. I was no longer bored. And I was no longer frustrated, because I had given up expecting. I had left behind my habits of teleological listening. I found myself fascinated with what I was hearing. The music was not simply a context for meditation, introspection, or daydreaming. I was listening. (1988, p.379)

 

[Slothrop]

There's such a thing as nonlinear acoustics, but the non-linearity seems to be down to the equations underpinning them rather than them actually being able to swerve the timeline altogether in the way I'm talking about.

Yeah, I mean in signal processing terms a tube amp is a nonlinear system, but I don't think we're looking for Stevie Ray Vaughan here.

To me the nonlinear thing is more about disrupting smooth, predictable evolution rather than just avoiding time-based change entirely. Extreme examples would be things like John Cage's Williams Mix



or maybe a performance of John Zorn's Cobra



where the development of the music is shaped and redirected by random processes, but to a lesser extent '93 hardcore introduces nonlinearity that largely wasn't there in '89 acid and isn't there in '97 drum and bass either.

Paradoxically, though, I'd say that a DAW timeline is actually pretty germane to this sort of nonlinearity - because you're not building it in real time, it's relatively easy to just jump at any point from one bit of audio or one set of instruments in one tempo to something completely different. From what I've seen, a lot of "trying to get away from the DAW" setups - Eurorack, grooveboxes, tape loops, Max/MSP, physical instruments, whatever - actually seem to push people towards logical, linear, relatively gradual development, because they often seem force you into a situation where something is happening and your options are mostly about changing and developing it in some way rather than just replacing it with a completely different thing.

 

[version]

I like the idea of music that seems to spread out rather than move from one point to another. The Basic Channel/Rhythm & Sound stuff sometimes has that feel, like a dense cloud or fog spreading in all directions with no clear beginning or end.

That paper mvuent quoted above: "I was entering the vertical time of the piece. My present expanded as I forgot about the music’s past and future."