Re: Please lets all sit together now and define what we do!

[Andre LaFosse <altruist@earthlink.net>]

Sitting by myself and having others define what I do...  ;)

sine@zerocrossing.net wrote:

> Andre's a good example of someone
> who stretches the term "looper..." but is he looping?  Not all the time 
>for sure.
> He's always recording though, and I think that's important.  

Well, I disagree on both counts here.  (Sorry, Mark, you had it coming
after the line about my clothes!  ;)

First of all, I'm certainly NOT always recording.  A big, big part of
what I do has to do with taking material that's been recorded and then
"bumping it around," by switching between loops, windowing, changing
direction and playback speed, remultiplying, or redefining the length of
the loop.  

None of this is adding any new material to the loop; it's taking
material already there and shuffling it back and forth to get new
musical phrases.  So saying that I'm "always recording" isn't accurate.  

What I AM doing all the time, I would say, is looping - even if the
sound isn't repeating verbatim over and over again.  The reason I say
that is simply because everything I'm doing is using some function or
feature within the Echoplex - there's no signal processing involved. 
All the technical hoo-hah is able to happen in the first place because
it's operating within a system which, in its default state, will repeat
a phrase over and over again.  

If you just performed an edit to a recording, you wouldn't hear it
unless you played it back again.  With a looper, you ALWAYS hear it
again, unless you go out of your way to stop it from repeating over and
over again.  So all that "real time editing" is taking place upon a
loop, and implementing those edits is fundamentally based on the
cyclical playback of the apparatus.

And if everything is being done with a looper, then surely it falls
under the "looping" category?

Here's another thing: effects processing has nothing to do with looping
in and of itself.  Things like pitch-shifting and time-stretching have
nothing inherently to do with looping; they're ways of processing sound, 
looped or otherwise.  

So I would submit the idea that using things like EDP "editing tricks"
actually represents a PURER form of "looping" than does a signal
processer-based approach, because it makes more fundamental use of the
EDP as the sole source of dealing with the sound (aside from the input
signal, of course).

This is one reason why I don't like the idea of defining "looping" based
on the expected end result - it makes me think of someone who wouldn't
recognize a Strat through a Marshall as a "guitar" because it doesn't 
sound like a nylon string classical guitar, you know?  

If an instrument is a tool for doing something, and a looper is an
instrument, and playing that particular instrument is "looping," then
why not define the instrument - and the technique - by the various
things it CAN possibly do?

Damn, it's a nice day outside and I'm sitting in front of a computer. 
What's wrong with this picture...

Ah well.

--Andre LaFosse
http://www.non-looping-real-time-audio-editing-orama.com