Hi Nick,
>
> No offence meant,
>
I didn't take your post as "offensive" but rather as "challenging" which I
found quite appropriate as the original announcement seemed quite
challenging to me as well.
Maybe I should have said 'build your own in principle'. My understanding is
> that there are only a few companies in the world who make the chips we
> depend on. Now, they have good reason to be open about the chip
> specification, but I think I was worrying about 'where it ends' if you start
> demanding independence, and how independent you could ever really be...
>
Well, I think the single most popular platform in computing ever, the
"IBM-compatible" (which now even includes Apple) got where it is by being
open. You can get hardware that conforms to that standard from any number of
manufacturers without a need to depend on a single one and because it's
standardised your choice of OS's is quite large on that platform as well.
Clearly it has to end somewhere or we would never get round to making music
but I think it ends in a acceptable way. I'm not independent in the sense
that I can make my own CPU in the kitchen but I am in the sense that if
Intel no longer pleases me I can go with AMD and basically get the exact
same thing.
> I still personally find the call exclusive, rather than open, but readily
> concede that it definitely sets up a compositional constraint some might
> enjoy.
>
I agree it's exclusive but I think there are interesting effects of that
beyond "compositional constraints" and "seeing whether Nick will boot Linux
from a CD" :¬p. Constraints have a way of forcing you to consciously notice
things you may have taken as a given. These days the tools used for creative
expression are often made by large companies instead of by the artists
themselves or by local craftsmen. There are any number of people that can
make a brush but only a single company that makes Photoshop, yet Photoshop
has become all but synonymous with "working with images".
There are many political and economical implications to that but the angle
that attracts me is the exact "10 years to master a instrument" we talked
about before. Many electronic instruments and many programs don't last that
long. Many instruments are build cheaply and programs may no longer function
after a OS update or the company may change it's direction and you may not
like the program that much in the next version. This is strongly related to
progress but it also means you may lose your 10 years investment. Personally
I'd like to be independent of that and I feel pointing out this phenomenon
in such a way is more interesting and more important then the actual
constraints on individual artists participating in this festival, as
interesting as those may be.
> I snipped your paragraph here; you put the issues well. I just happen
> myself to find them less interesting as issues than a discussion about
> non-standard temperaments, about algorithms for counterpoint generation etc.
>
So am I, but I found that after I switched to a open instrument as my main
one this became much easier. I don't think this need be inherently the case
but with some exceptions I experience the open instruments at my disposal as
being more open-ended then the closed commercial ones as well.
To me the stylistic influence of the instrument is a interesting and
important matter and I find it's cause for concern that many modern
instruments make strong assumptions about the musical styles they'll be used
for, assumptions that seem to be based by companies on what's popular at the
moment. I experience a link between the cheap build quality of a lot of
modern hardware and the short-livedness on fashionable styles and I wonder
what this will do to the long-term development of musicians using them.
> None of this is meant to be inflammatory, just expressing some concerns.
>
I'm not sure about Marije but I feel your concerns are entirely healthy and
to me it's clear that a debate like this is exactly what these constraints
were meant to encourage, probably in adition to showing the world what can
be acomplished with open/free tools, something I suspect many people aren't
as aware of as we here are.
Perhaps it would be nice to be inflamatory, there are important questions
here and it would be troublesome if people *didn't* have strong feelings
about their instruments but I suspct we already agree on most counts.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Sat Aug 16 2008 - 13:11:00 BST