Guitar Lessons by Chip McDonald - chip@chipmcdonald.com: Impressions - Being Human is Data Compression

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Impressions - Being Human is Data Compression

 I just tried to make a video for YouTube.

I was doing an extemporaneous analysis of the bootleg multitracks of the Beatle's _Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_.  So I thought, hey, I'll just go through each track and babble about what strikes me as it happens.

 As it turns out - and I knew this, but it was not illustrated to me so viscerally - I think a lot.  I did an hour straight on trying to get out of my mind thoughts about just the second section string track and the vocal track.  I was trying to be "not super detailed, not overly OCD".  I skipped a lot, what I perceive as being "a lot".

 What I don't perceive as being "a lot" is what is condensed as "what I'm hearing".   To unpack what I'm perceiving on just 2 seconds of part of the strings track could really take easily over an hour.  Translating instantaneous perception to what is in reality "slow motion" human "music theory" jargon. 

 But then also, the implications of it.  How it strikes me emotionally, but then also what I think the context is, and the timbral sound, and the ambience. 

 I stopped after realizing I could probably make 4+ videos on each part.   Whether anyone would care I don't know, I halfway think I should just do it just to see, or for merely the sake of it.  What is interesting is that in the literal process of doing it, I realized how much information the idea of


"AN IMPRESSION"

 

reduces, as a human.  It's somewhat token based, but also a blend of other compression and sorting schemes.  

 The human input/output buffer is massively parallel, obviously.   An epiphany for me is that what probably makes me a "naturally overtly talented musician" will work against me in this context.  It might be informational for a student, when I forced to condense things into a 30 minute lesson, but when allowed to expand in this way without that temporal boundary it's an ocean of information to wade through and collate.

 I've been thinking deeply about music since I was very, very young.  There are pictures of me with headphones on when I was 4 years old, pictures of me plucking at a toy piano at younger than that.  The ... internal array, the framework of my perception being built for decades now, is a way of compressing experience.  It's what humans do, catalog, sort, and collate experience.  For musical moments, it's definitely too much to try to unpack into a video explanation of said perception in a completely accurate fashion.  It would take a brain download to do that, but the question is can I rise to the challenge of being able to *moderate* it well enough to make gradations of decompressed-perception, to present a pragmatically granular explanation of "thought" that can be of use to somebody?

 I don't know.

 For a few years I've been mulling the idea of making a video series on the title of "Speculative Musical Anthropology", where I babble on what I *think* are connections between different pieces of music from a common background/influence.  I've jettisoned that as YouTube has allowed the corporate copyright-claim jihad to obliterate doing video on "things that could reference copyrighted material", despite the allowance for such a thing under the premise of education.  I don't want to go gangbusters into such a thing only to have it taken down; and I'm typically not motivated to do things if they're inherently likely to be stilted from the outset.  Pursuing the middle ground is the most difficult thing of all, of course.

 I'm stilling cooking the idea, though.  Let me know your thoughts if one cares about said subject.  I know I need a "Youtube presence", but the option-anxiety of possibility is immense.  






5 comments:

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  2. Parkinson's Law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". It's awesome you tried a video and don't think the issue of it being too long is unique at all. I was at a meeting last night that was supposed to feature four "lightning talks" of 15 minutes each. Much to the dismay of the organizers, each talk ended up being more like 25 minutes, which is, unfortunately, more normal than not. Sales people practice and train to pitch their company/product in elevator speeches - the time it takes for a typical elevator to go from floor 1 to 4. Conveying a topic clearly and concisely in a set amount of time takes practice and effort (seems like I've heard "practice and effort" about something else). You're able to deliver an an effective message during a 30 minute lesson because that's all the time you have, and you've practiced for a couple decades.

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  3. I think the difficulty lies not in your ability to frame such discourse or dissertation within a specified time. But letting it flow and letting things shake out during the editing process which all great filmmakers have to slosh through with such painstaking detail as not too obscure the information or feeling they're trying to express. Twofold benefit of pre-empting potential copyright infringement. Maybe a good time to delve into Final Cut Pro?

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  4. Maybe John’s onto something. Some of Beato’s best videos are when he rambles on and goes down some rabbit trails for 40 minutes or so. Some good stuff comes out.

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