Objectivist/Subjectivist Discussion with Jamie Howarth of Plangent Processing

[geetee1972]

No desire to spend my time wading through this. I’ve spent decades making fine art prints. I know how much better, and more true to life, a finely made color digital print is than from the primitive chemical print process. Beyond that, it’s the skill/artistry of the the printmaker that matters. It’s a mistake to be too hung up on the various technologies. Same goes for music reproduction.

But what makes you think that 'true to life' makes for a better print?

 

[wil]

But what makes you think that 'true to life' makes for a better print?

That depends on your intentions. In my case, mostly natural "landscape" work, I'm seeking to capture the nuance of light, texture, color, detail that I see with my eyes. Digital photography/printing give much finer controls over all the parameters that go into making the initial image capture and especially the final print. It's not even close.

But I will say my favorite process has been using 4x5 transparency film which is then drum scanned into a very large digital file and then printed through digital software to a pigment print. I do like the film but it is limited in more difficult lighting. And there have been a few masters of the Ilfohcrome (Cibachrome) process that produce uniquely beautiful prints. But. overall, digital prints today are better. Darkroom color printing is a thing of the past. Black and White Darkroom is still vibrant artwork.

This doesn't mean there aren't tons of awful digital prints made and sold every day. Again, it's who's doing the printing, not the tools used. This is where a valid photography/audio parallel can be valid.

 

[geetee1972]

That depends on your intentions. In my case, mostly natural "landscape" work, I'm seeking to capture the nuance of light, texture, color, detail that I see with my eyes. Digital photography/printing give much finer controls over all the parameters that go into making the initial image capture and especially the final print. It's not even close.

But I will say my favorite process has been using 4x5 transparency film which is then drum scanned into a very large digital file and then printed through digital software to a pigment print. I do like the film but it is limited in more difficult lighting. And there have been a few masters of the Ilfohcrome (Cibachrome) process that produce uniquely beautiful prints. But. overall, digital prints today are better. Darkroom color printing is a thing of the past. Black and White Darkroom is still vibrant artwork.

This doesn't mean there aren't tons of awful digital prints made and sold every day. Again, it's who's doing the printing, not the tools used. This is where a valid photography/audio parallel can be valid.

Interesting you say dark room printing is a thing of the past because on the two occasions I've been selected for exhibition in the (English) National Portrait Gallery, it's been with prints made in a dark room with a printer from film negative. And I still maintain that nothing beats 4x5 (negative, not colour transparency) film for tonal and dynamic range, though as you say, you have to spend $100 to drum scan the neg. Some of the 16-bit digital monsters get close and they'll close the gap eventually I guess.

But more importantly, I, and a lot of other people, don't like that hyper-realistic landscape work. It lacks emotional depth in my experience but that is a very subjective opinion!

 

[Rt66indierock]

Ron - I feel your pain. Not that I am in the Post Modernist 'everything is a social construct' camp (very far from it), but the engineers in this space who think that the way music should be reproduced is the result of logically deterministic parameters doesn't just baffle me, it triggers me.

There are two arguments you can use to shut someone like this down.

The first is to ask them if they think their measurement strategy can measure the difference in Bach's cello suites played by say Jacqueline D'upree and Janos Starker. Or if it can account for the difference in greatness between Miles Davis and Lee Morgan, or John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley.

The measurement may certainly be able to tell you how close to fidelity the sound of a saxophone is reproduced by a system, but can it measure the difference in emotive style between the two people playing it? If the answer is yes, then I may well concede that there is logically deterministic way approach to hifi design that ought to supersede the subjective listening experience. But I don't think there is any measurement system that can do this, and nor do I think there ever will be. I believe (but am happy to be proven wrong), that there is something in the way music is played that transcends logical determinism.

The second argument you can throw in his face is the increasing evidence that human consciousness is itself, not logically deterministic. Most people, including all those vain engineers and bitcoin idiots who believe that AI will approach and surpass human consciousness, still vainly flair in their belief that human consciousness is a logically deterministic construct and that all we have to do is replicate in digital gates the number of synapses there are in the brain (I believe it's 10^15) and we will be there. We're currently at 10^12 so close-ish.

Here's what those people fail to understand; we don't even know what consciousness is, let alone that it is logically deterministic. Why we would assume that is easy to understand (our familiarity with computational devices), but naive. There is increasing evidence that consciousness arises from quantum effects (see the work of Roger Penrose and the recent studies showing that consciousness does indeed seem to be connected to quantum effects: Study Supports Quantum Basis of Consciousness in the Brain)

On that basis, not only does AI have no possible way of emulating human consciousness but our whole experience of the material world is subjective (which is not to say that the material world is also entirely subjective, just our experience of it). This means that you can both be right. It may be possible to be entirely objective about music replay (from a logically deterministic perspective), and for our experience of it to be entirely subjective.

The question then becomes, to what end or purpose are you putting those measurements to work? If your objective approach results in something we subjectively like, where is the problem?

An electroencephalogram (EEG) will do it. I’d love to have had the chance to be hooked up to one and compare my emotions to Pappa John Creach, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes and Ketch Secor on the fiddle (violin). I’m sure my EEG would measure different emotions than yours in your examples. As it should be, music is personal.

If a significant number of people can hear something we can measure it. You guys always forget this.

 

[geetee1972]

An electroencephalogram (EEG) will do it. I’d love to have had the chance to be hooked up to one and compare my emotions to Pappa John Creach, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes and Ketch Secor on the fiddle (violin). I’m sure my EEG would measure different emotions than yours in your examples. As it should be, music is personal.

If a significant number of people can hear something we can measure it. You guys always forget this.

It's not about what you hear, it's about how it makes you feel. You guys always seem to forget that!

And an EEG will indeed tell you that someone is having an emotional response for sure, but that's a sledge hammer to solve a walnut. All you need to do is ask someone how they are feeling and base their response on the premise that they've no reason to lie.

But an EEG cannot tell you what is different between the way musicians play, and there is a difference, otherwise we wouldn't have feted artistes like the ones I listed.

I think part of the problem here is the we don't know what it is that we want to measure between the way artists play music and thus by extention, we don't know what we should be measuring that tells us system A is better/preferable to system B. It doesn't preclude the possibility that it's not ever measurable though of course, ultimately, all of this is moot since we cannot now measure consciousness, nor will we ever be able to.

Consciousness is now and always will be, beyond measurement.

 

[Rt66indierock]

You are thinking clinical not in a research mode. I've previously posted we can reconstruct music from brain waves so I disagree. I'd love to have an EEG of my emotions when Pappa John Creach played the fiddle but he died in 1994. And I would argue we can tell what is different between musicians. It was certainly easy to tell (measure) what is different between a cellist with great potential and a very good one (my daughter) when they played next to each other.

I think my "we" know what we need to measure. Your "we" has a vested financial interest in keeping alive "we don't know what we need to measure".

 

[wil]

Interesting you say dark room printing is a thing of the past because on the two occasions I've been selected for exhibition in the (English) National Portrait Gallery, it's been with prints made in a dark room with a printer from film negative. And I still maintain that nothing beats 4x5 (negative, not colour transparency) film for tonal and dynamic range, though as you say, you have to spend $100 to drum scan the neg. Some of the 16-bit digital monsters get close and they'll close the gap eventually I guess.

But more importantly, I, and a lot of other people, don't like that hyper-realistic landscape work. It lacks emotional depth in my experience but that is a very subjective opinion!

Thing of the past, mostly, for Color Photography— but certainly not black-and-white.

I agree much digital photography is hyper, hyper “realistic”. Which of course is not really realistic or natural. It’s very easy to overdo it with digital tools. That’s the fault of the person at the helm of the tools, not the tools themselves!

 

[geetee1972]

You are thinking clinical not in a research mode. I've previously posted we can reconstruct music from brain waves so I disagree. I'd love to have an EEG of my emotions when Pappa John Creach played the fiddle but he died in 1994. And I would argue we can tell what is different between musicians. It was certainly easy to tell (measure) what is different between a cellist with great potential and a very good one (my daughter) when they played next to each other.

I think my "we" know what we need to measure. Your "we" has a vested financial interest in keeping alive "we don't know what we need to measure".

I'd very happily be corrected that we can measure the improvements. I fully admit my comment was hypothesising. But to a large extent it's not really of interest to me as the only measurement I care about is my hearing experience. That's not to dismiss the value to others of course b