[PD] elitism, software and academia (was GEM FTGL Sadness)

[john saylor]

hi

On 6/7/07, David Powers <cyborgk at gmail.com> wrote:
> I really think it's just absurd to force all musicians into a model
> that may only make sense from the software engineering / DSP side of
> things. I usually am arguing more on the pro-technology side of
> things, but in this case I think I must remind people : you don't need
> a computer to make music.

of course that is true. all you really need is your voice [or 'love'
if you're a beatle wannabe] ...

but if you want to do electronic music, with any degree of
sophistication, you need to learn the tools. i guess i get a bit
irritated when people think that computer music should be immediately
accessible to them- then get upset when they find out they need to
understand something about how computers work with audio in order to
get what they want out of them. they think they can just press a
button and ...

if you just sit down at a piano and don't know anything about it, you
might get some nice stuff out- but it's more a matter of serendipity
than anything. you practice to get better.

computers use math to do audio [dsp, convolution, ...]. so you need to
study math [not really that much for most applications, but it does
help]. and learning a programming language in some way will help too.
musicians have been doing math for a long time [at least since
pythagorean tunings, if not before]. and i don't even know about
chinese or indian or arab or X traditions. [using algebra in a
sentence there]

also the jump from composition to programming is really not that
great. it's all about flow control ...

-- 
\js  [ http://or8.net/~johns/ ]