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by PaulDavisThe1st
1762 days ago
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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. |
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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/