Computer Instruments in the Grand Scheme of Music
Reading response to Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime by Ge Wang, Chapter 5 + Interlude
Terry Feng | 10/30/2022 | Music 256A | Stanford University
In reading Chapter 5 and the interlude of Artful Design, featured were so many weird, wacky, computer music interfaces. These inventions, coming in all shapes and sizes, programmed and mapped in different ways, with different sensors, mappings, and sounds, revealed to me just how young and wild “computer music” as a whole was. To me, the computer instruments seem to be one-off “inventions,” musical products engineered out of exploration, rather than from the perspective of a musician who simply plays an instrument. In reading through the chapter, I drew a computer instrument line between an “inventors creative endeavour” as opposed to a “performers musical endeavour.”
To make computer instruments that are “human”, we first study existing instruments, how we play them, how we interact with them, and how we can embody them to express ourselves. Acoustic instrument design is mutualized, meaning form follows physics (p.224). These instruments are more intuitive, natural, and transparent. When we play them, there’s nothing hidden — they’re simply are an expressive window of ourselves. On the other hand, computer instrument design is de-mutualized, where form doesn’t follow function (p. 225). There lies a black box between performer, input, button, or sensor, to the speaker that can produce any imaginable sound. That black box is what makes computer instruments special. This black box of potentially infinite programmable mappings defines the computer music that comes out of the instrument. The end result can be transformative, or simply alienating, artificial and synthetic. Computer instruments therefore do not directly reveal their user, you can put a little in and get a lot out, or worse, vice versa. Computer music exists and thrives because of this black box…and this is also what places the future of computer instruments in a precarious situation.
Computer music is versatile, malleable, and adaptable, there’s not one way to program its black box, or even limit the medium (instrument) that it exists in. From coffee cup to stuffed animal to digital screen or physical accordion, anything can be manipulated into a computer instrument. In this chapter, beside every music instrument/interface/invention was its creator/inventor. In the realm of computer music, more than just what music can we create is what medium can we create to house this music? So here’s my big question for the future of computer music:
Who’s doing the computer music?
Is it the musician who’s performing or the medium creator, expertly designing a black box that controls, quantizes, or aestheticizes its user? You can simply be a computer instrument user or you can also be a computer instrument creator. You can alter what you play, and you can alter what you play. The computer programmable black box makes everything possible. So does the future of computer music look like mastering and creating black boxes as carrier/interfaces for computer music, or the more traditional route of accepting the instrument/interface black box and spending a lifetime perfecting and expressing ourselves through one specific medium?
As an art, computer music is so paradoxical, it expresses both the creator and the user, it can be mutualized or demutualized, it can be a cup or not a cup at all. It’s impossible to limit computer music to one instrument to be practiced, studied, and performed for decades, and therefore for the future of computer music, hard to say whether the things we build now can have widespread or lasting power. A laptop accordion may an interesting interface to explore but it’s hard to say if that remains relevant 5,10, or a hundred years down the line. The black box, the computer instrument, the medium of malleable programmability by definition is impermanent. Principle 5.12 by Perry Cook says make a piece, not an instrument or controller. Don’t just focus on the medium of interface, rather focus on the content of music itself.
