GG Sighting in Sci-Fi Book!

[Arin Murphy <la_murph@alcor.concordia.ca>]

I meant to tell you all about this ages ago, but I misplaced the book and
hence was muddy on the reference.

In April '98 Bantam Spectra published a mass-market paperback entitled
WYRM by Mark Fabi. It's a pretty neat near-future look at the Millennium
Bug and chess-playing computers and programming and debugging and virtual
reality and AI and such, and I do recommend it. It's quite intelligently
written and has a very engaging style. What else endeared it to me was the
exchange the main characters have about GG and Bach. Here's an extract for
you: 

	It was late when we got to George's place, but none of us felt
like going to sleep yet. George put on a pot of decaf and a CD of Glenn
Gould playing the Goldberg Variations....
	... we just listened to the music for a while.
	"Didn't you have that on vinyl when we were in school?" I asked
George when the CD reached its end.
	"I still do; I just don't play it anymore. It's a bit of a
collector's item."
	Al smiled; she had obviously been enjoying the music. "You like
Bach, hunh?" she asked George.
	I laughed. "George likes Bach because he thinks if he were alive
today, he'd be a hacker."
	"Not _would_ be. Bach _was_ a hacker. He just programmed for
organs and harpsichords and stuff. What's a musical score, anyway? It's an
algorithm."
	"But what about the musician's interpretation of the music?" Al
asked. "Not every pianist would play the Goldberg Variations like Glenn
Gould."
	"And what about improvisation?" I added. "Especially for a jazz
musician like you - but even baroque music allowed for the performers to
add a lot of ruffles and flourishes."
	George shook a finger at me. "That's just a limitation of the
current technology. Someday computers will interpret a program - and
improvise! - just like a musician. You'll see."  (WYRM, p. 238-9)

	I guess George owns the '55 Goldbergs!

So there you are; another GG sighting in a book. It raises some
interesting points, especially in light of the remastering/sound cleanup
thread that's been running for a while now. The use of computers might
someday extend to sliding a program in, choosing a performer's style to
interpret the contents in, and voila! Chopin or Mozart a la GG, or whoever
else you like.

For now, I think I'll stick to my CDs.

Back to lurking...



Arin

	--------------

>From the terminal of:
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	Temporal Engineering, USS Raven

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