Reading Response #4: Artful Design Chapter 4: “Programmability and Sound Design”

Alanna Sun

October 17, 2021

CS 476A, Stanford University

Reading Response: Design Things With a Computer That Would Not Be Possible Without!

This week’s reading goes into sound design through programming, which I found very interesting as I haven’t had much exposure to music programming before. When considering the definition of art, my initial instinct is to lean more towards the camp of seeing art as human expression through traditional mediums (e.g. playing an instrument, painting, writing, etc.). With the recent rise of AI-generated drawings or music, it’s easy to forget that there can be a lot of intentionality put into the act of programming that results in creative expression. It made me realize that my perception of coding is more old school than new school, and encouraged me to think about more ways to make programming iterative, allowing design and runtime to become simultaneous and continuous. In this vein, I thought the examples of “Table’s Clear” and the subsequently inspired piece “Beijing” were so cool because you could suddenly summon the memory of a place, thereby bringing back the emotions and sensations of a common, shared experience while also introducing new ones through the defamiliarization of everyday sounds. My family is from Beijing, so when I saw the page with all the recorded sounds of the city--from the bicycles to the street food vendors--I was immediately reminded of home in Beijing, because I could already hear these sounds so distinctly in my mind! The idea behind “Table’s Clear” also reminded me of John Cage’s 4’33’, in which the score tells performers to not play their instruments for four minute and thirty-three seconds, making the point that in silence we hear the sounds of the environment, and that any sound can be music.

The idea of composing music through programming as “cooking with raw ingredients” is new to me, but, it’s true, I suppose we are really just zooming in and designing sound starting from a more local level. This ties into the design principle that stood out to me this week: Design Things With a Computer That Would Not Be Possible Without! It’s really important to consider why we are using programming to create these things, and what it is about programming, specifically, that allows us to create them. Similar to how different poetic forms lend themselves to different ideas and modes of expression, programming allows us to manipulate the granular elements of sound, capturing and developing combinations that were never available before. It really proves Cage’s point that anything can be music, and furthers the level of intentionality that having a human in the loop, controlling these seemingly random elements, can generate.