Gottcha. Up until now I was going to object, but if canon says Rlaan music is complex, then complex it is. Personally, I would have made rlaan music not entirely too different from Western classical. Reason being, our being brainwashed with Pythagorean scale and derivatives makes us slaves of powers of two and three. This is not only so in frequency ratios (3/2, 9/8, 27/32, 81/64, etc.), but even our rhythm's can't ever seem to get out of 2's, 4's, 6's, 3's, rarely 9's; almost never a 5 or 7. So, I was thinking the rlaan, with hexagons coming out of their hexagonal nostrils would be co-discoverers of the Pythagorean obsession.klauss wrote:I don't believe familiarity is all, but it is indeed a strong factor.
But, mostly so, my point is that if you make "rlaan music", it will appeal to the invented rlaan aesthetics, which will probably not match human aesthetics. In essence, rlaan music will appeal to the fictional rlaan sensitivity, and not the the human player of the game.
So even alien music has to be alien only "up to a point".
I've long been lectured by my dad on the wonderful canon with 32, 64, 200 voices made by one of the sch guys (I always mix schöemberg, shostakovich and all the s(c)h-s). Thing is, I've heard it multiple times and I can't appreciate it... it's too complex. I've been used to "simple" music all my life, I grew fond of it. I find pleasure in the simplest music detailed to perfection, where a simple theme carries a lot of emotion or form. I just can't rejoice on huge complexities, it sounds like noise to me - because I got used to simplicity for long enough to now like it, above complexity.
I've seen similar phenomena on others, people used to pop music just expect the "beating drums", or whatever constant they're used to hearing. When they don't, immediately, their likelihood of finding a piece likable drops. It's not certainty, sometimes they'll like it, sometimes they don't, but unfamiliar things certainly play against it, and not for it.
Rlaan, going back to the 200-voice canon, have a documented tendency to immense multitasking, and their music has been documented to be that complex at least. With multiple independent voices and whatnot. That will sound like noise to me, and I'm used to a lot more complexity than the average joe just by being used to listening to classical music.
What I would have made really different and alien would be, in fact, human music. All of human history since the last ice age has been an exponential "bacterial" growth, in population, in tools, in information, and of course, radical shifts in entropy. The harder and more obviously unsustaintable this course becomes, the harder the drum-beat sound trying to cheer us on. We left behind all subtle harmonies and scales, left behind all subtle rhythms, and we're getting more and more of the same 2:3 poison enemas. 2, the number of self-righteousness; 3 the number of passion; 4 the number of "squareness"... We are starved to death of any subtlety whatsoever; no wonder there is no need to forcibly brainwash us anymore; most kids and teenagers demand their daily dose of brainwash. Music starvation is so harsh we're like concentration camp victims that could die if suddenly given real food. Ironically, every new music movement, from rock to electronica, hipop, you name it, is all just various flavors of the same deadly syrup, while pretending to be rebellious or revolutionary, every time.
But we're going to have the honor to witness, in our lifetimes, the end of this 10,000 year aberration. This is all going down, finally.
Fermentation is complete. Oil, rare earths, soil, trees, fish and other sugars are running out, and our waste is bursting out of containment, and once we're clearly past the peak and going down fast, finally it won't be just philosophers and conspiracy theorists that will talk about the 10,000 year mistake; it will be everybody that lives; and then the garbage we listen to and gladly convince ourselves is "music" will be recognized as the garbage it always was. That's why I'd make human music the most alien of all. When humans DO spread among the stars, the civilization from which that expansion will proceed from will be very different from our present one.
Agreed. And there'd be nothing wrong in attacking popular music, really; most of it is total garbage; a statistical fact. Thing is, though, a) sometimes there are incredible precious jewels coming out anew; and it is not befitting of true musc lovers to ignore them; --in fact, we ought to look for them; and b) music is part of who we are, not just yesterday but today; and the fact that we're in deep shit doesn't mean that we are not.It's not an attack on popular music, classical pieces take years of composition, sometimes a life, while popular ones take months, perhaps a year instead, and it results in a level of refinement, attention to detail, and sometimes complexity that is, in average, a lot more than in popular music.
100 voices doesn't imply "noise". If they were all harmonics of one base frequency they would sound as a single note, in fact. In fact, if 100 instruments played all the prime number harmonics of a bass note, they would sound as harmonic as octaves, yet alien in the sense that the only prime numbers we're used to are 2 and 3.Furthermore, popular music is restricted by the structure of rock/pop/jazz/whatever bands, with only a handful of instruments, whereas classical masterpieces are free sometimes to require an orchestra of 60, perhaps 100 players. Still, 32 voice canon is strange to me - you can bet the average joe will listen to it like he was listening to static noise.
And if you follow the canon on rlaan music, you will most likely end up with that kind of "noise music". Which won't be good.
So that's my point.
Now imagine --well, you can't; but at least intellectually imagine-- a scale made of only prime number harmonics, and instruments playing independent melodies of prime numbers of notes per bar. It would sound ABSOLUTELY alien, and yet PERFECTLY harmonic.
That's my point.