Hi all,
I'm at the sound and music conference in Barcelona, yesterday we had
an interesting panel discussion titled "Tools for Music or Music for
Tools?"
http://smc2010.smcnetwork.org/panel.htm . I guess I have
grown so used to thinking about code as musical material that I forgot
that for most people it is a way for engineers to make 'tools' which
are then 'used', often by other people to make music. Arne
Eigenfeldt, a composer talked about how he has to make his own tools
because the ones he wants aren't available, but he makes sure he
switches completely out of "tool maker" mode into a tool user mode for
when he actually makes music. This is a totally reasonable approach,
and seems standard in this computer music community, but I guess I had
stopped thinking about it.
I guess the alternative put forward by live coders and generative
musicians is that computer music can be about language, not tools.
This I think is quite a different metaphor, language is more like an
space you work in, and a tool is a hammer you use to make a space. A
tool is used to make something else, but a language is part of
utterances in it, in a nice figure-ground relationship. Tools rather
poetically extend the body/mind, but languages are shared by a
culture, and provide environments for thought.
But perhaps a similar intermediate stage divides language maker and
language user? I'm not sure, I feel both extending a language and
making statements within it can be musical acts, and any dividing line
between would be false. I'm happy with this because I think dividing
lines tend to enforce strange 'engineer' and 'artist' roles.
What I got confused by in the panel though is when people referred to
max/msp, processing, reacTable etc as "tools", I think this is a huge
understatement really, that these are languages not tools, and it
would be nice to hear a bit more about computer music language in this
kind of conference. I think the use of language is what can make
computer music making qualitatively different from other approaches.
I asked a question about this at the panel and Cristian Vogel gave a
very nice answer to in agreement, which I wish I had recorded somehow.
cheers
alex
--
http://yaxu.org/
Received on Sat Jul 24 2010 - 11:26:03 BST