Pan Fidelity - Parallax Fidelity

So the story goes that Schoenberg did not agree with his serial music being called "atonality" - his idea was to embrace all tonalities, not reject them. And so he preferred the term "pan-tonality".

So I've had an idea for a long time, and until I heard about this, I couldn't properly ground it. In the realm of audio, I've always had a problem with mixes that are too clean - sterile sounding - where the rawness is absent. On the other hand if a mix is too dirty, clarity and presence will eventually be lost to entropy.

So I think a balance needs to be struck that embraces the spectrum from high to low fidelity. High and low fidelity have different characters, different timbres, and evoke different human responses. They expand the palette of audio production.

To me this is a continuum that could be flowed through freely when making music - and much work has been done already with glitch music, chip-tune, bit-reduction effects, etc. I think the scope for exploring this further is huge, and great potentials exist for expressiveness through transformations and combinations of fidelity, if explored with conscious intention.

Also, considerations of "parallax-fidelity" seem to be a natural extension of this. Layers of fidelity that add to the perception of a sound being closer or further away - moving at different rates, as does a parallax landscape.

My experiments with Streamland are moving towards establishing the groundwork for this idea.