Re: synesthesia

[John Hill <jphill@home.com>]

Elmer Elevator wrote:
> 
> Like a family Christmas, we
> remember the Smell of the Hall. We remember a little bit of the ambient
> coughing
> and fidgeting and how it resonated. We remember the excitement of the special
> occasion.

Strange how memory can be triggered so strongly by olfactory stimuli.
 
> Ordinarily these subtle and unique little extras are way in the background.

True, but they're *there*.  And our brains are really, really good at decoding that
information, even on a subconscious level.  One interesting feature of
human psychoacoustics is that it is possible for humans to decode information
below the noise floor of a recording (hall ambience, etc.).  With digital, the noise
floor is vanishingly low, but the stuff that's down there can be quite
distorted and
unmusical sounding.

> With computers and electronics, we should have been able to produce Perfect
> Music -- take a Bach score and just have the computer play precisely the
> right
> tempo, precisely the right frequencies, precisely the right wave shapes,
> attacks,
> sustains and decays. And completely banish bad microphone placement, bad
> acoustics, coughing, fidgeting, and certainly humming.

It's certainly possible to step enter this music using a synth keyboard and some
sequencer software.  But it sounds like dreck with everything quantized.  You have
to add human *interpretation* to make this listening experience palatable. 
How will
you decide on timbre choices, tempo, articulation, phrasing, dynamics, etc?
Whose interpretation will we use in creating this "perfect" realization?

Bach, unfortunately, is no longer available.  And we can't be completely sure how
he would have played these works.  But even if we *did* know Bach's feelings
about this, would his interpretation be the only "correct" one?

jh