[PaulDavisThe1st]

No. I'm asking why we want it to be easier.

You can make getting from A to B easier (and faster), by replacing walking with cycling. You make it even easier with a bus, and easier still with a car. In some circumstances, this is valuable and should be welcomed. But it's a mistake to think that moving from A to B in a car is actually the same experience as doing so on foot.

I'm suggesting that this might be true of making music also.

[filoleg]

>I'm suggesting that this might be true of making music also.

No, it isn't, because unlike with getting from point A to point B, the end result isn't always the same with music making.

Music, in that aspect, is more like writing code or visual arts. Printing and photography becoming widely available didn't make visual arts worse, they did the opposite, because instead of focusing on just technical proficiency, the art was forced to move in a more creative direction.

With programming, us not punching cards with code and not using assembly as the primary language didn't make things worse, it just allowed us to go on a higher level and create things that would be unthinkable without that.

Same with music making. Being able to record a virtual orchestra in your bedroom studio doesn't make music as art worse, it opens up way more room for things that weren't even possible before. Just by definition, when it becomes much easier and really accessible to record something in your bedroom, which previously only a few extremely rich people in the world with tons of experienced staff could do, it allows for art to evolve faster and move forward just by the sheer drive of all the people who now have access to contribute to it.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

One of my go-to examples in this domain is to look back at the career of the composer Steve Reich. Living in NYC, it wasn't so difficult for him to find performers to realize the (then radical) musical ideas he was experimenting with in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If Reich had been living in Smalltownsville, SomeState it could have been much, much more challenging (arguably close to impossible). So in this sense, the accessibility of contemporary digital audio workstation technology [0] makes it more feasible for anyone with musical ideas to explore them, and we should celebrate this.

However, the path that Reich did actually follow underscores the senses in which making music is so often a social activity, and there is no doubt based on interviews with Reich that having/choosing to work with other human musicians changed the evolution of his music. Not everyone likes his music, and of those who do, some might have preferred the direction it might have gone had Reich been an Ableton Live user. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that music as a social activity is critical to almost all good-to-great music, and that contemporary technology frequently undermines that.

[0] perhaps paradoxically, I am the author of just such a piece of technology.

[filoleg]

>I continue to believe that music as a social activity is critical to almost all good-to-great music, and that contemporary technology frequently undermines that.

Agreed on it being a social activity, but disagreed on contemporary approaches undermining the social aspect of it. Sure, it gives you an option to be more asocial when it comes to making music, but it also gives you ability to be more social than ever before.

Ableton Live has a remote collaboration feature now, so you can work on music together with people who are thousands of miles away from you. Quite a bunch of software solutions are available that make jamming together and recording music with people separated from you (by distance) easy and fun. Something like Splice Studio[0] is a godsend for remote DAW sync and collaboration.

0. https://splice.com/blog/how-to-use-splice-studio/

[Cycl0ps]

I can agree that this is a differet experience than other ways of composing, but I think that's a good thing. Walking from A-B let's you experience the travel in detail, driving let's you visit more places in the same time. Both have their benefits, but you can't say one is better than the other without a specific use case in mind. In a more literal view, LudoTune offers a set of conviences and constraints that aren't had with other systems. Combined, those changes will encourage exploration and the growth of new ideas.

While it was before my time, I'm sure the development of synthesizers and sampling audio tracks were considered by some to be shortening the travel-time between A and B, but those became influential in modern music. Maybe this isn't the next big thing in music, but it could be, and I'm curious to see how far it can be taken.

[vosper]

This isn’t going to replace other ways of making music, in the same way that people still walk and cycle even though cars exist

[dkersten]

An aside from my own life that I found interesting: for a long time I thought "surely there's a way, electronically or otherwise, to have an easier more ergonomic interface to making guitar-like music than a guitar". Then I learned to actually play the guitar and realised just how much control over the sound you have and how expressive it is and realised that replacing that with something easier would actually be pretty damn hard.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I wasn't suggesting that. My remark/question was about the general idea that we should try to make making music easier.