Reading Response 5

There is a key thing missing from the interface interaction loop that underpins the entire fifth chapter of “Artful Design.” I know this is a bold claim to make, but it’s immensely important to me: audience interaction is a necessary part of the interaction feedback loop for a musical instrument, yet this is largely glossed over by this chapter, even in the section on laptop orchestras, which raise some really fun and intriguing questions about audience interaction by their existence alone. (i.e. “What can I get away with?” which I think is very much in line with the later principle I.1)

Let’s start with the concept of audience interaction in general: how necessary is “performance” to making music? The most relevant google definition for performance is “an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment.” The important word here is “presenting,” and there are many different audiences a presentation can be addressed to. Narrowing in on musical performance, music can be made to express a part of oneself to an entire stadium, a single person, or even no other person, and these all change the experience of making that music drastically. Even a theoretical audience of zero in some way affects the interactions involved in making music with an instrument, and should be accounted for in this loop. In essence, performance is an inescapable part of bringing music into existence.

What about pre-recorded music, then? This is a relatively new mode of performance brought on by recent technology that is often wrongly construed as the antithesis to “true” performance. Rather, it’s just a wonderful decoupling-in-time of when music is made and when the audience gets to interact with it. In fact, recorded music opens the door for even MORE types of audience interaction. Would my favorite bands be willing to accompany little old me on all my lonely late-night drives? Surely not, but the musical experiences I’ve had on those drives are some of the most meaningful moments I’ve had!

All this is not to say that I myself know everything about performing. I have much more to learn about performance than many musicians I know, but I cannot deny its importance in my own work. Every one of my musical works that I’m proud of has boiled down not to the technology that I use or how creative my compositions or improvisations are, but to how my interactions with my audience felt. The reverse is true for each musical work I’m not proud of: I didn’t have the “most successful” interactions with my audiences, or even worse, forgot about them entirely. However, this exists as clear proof to me that in any musical system I design for the music I make, an audience will be part of how I interact with my tools, and I should pay attention to this in my designs in order to improve them!

There’s one other really important concept in this chapter I want to touch on: the discussion of principle 5.17 states that “embodiment matters,” and these are words to live by! Our preconceived opinions of computers and virtual reality hide this from us, but everything in our world is embodied and it is not only impossible for us to try to ditch our own embodied-ness, but hurtful towards ourselves as well. The laptops in a laptop orchestra are physically embodied objects, and we can use them to interact in really special ways with our physically embodied audiences! Even VR headsets are physically embodied objects, full of the advantages and limitations of their physicality. I think where the notion of these things’ disembodiment may come from is their extreme over-customizability, a dual blessing/curse which I admiree Perry Cook’s thoughts on.

Speaker cones, for example, are embodied objects, and physically radiate sound in their own special ways. I’d argue that this makes them no less of an instrument, and the history of popular music seems to agree with me. A portion of “Artful Design” seems to argue that a lack of an extremely direct connection between an instrument and the sounds it produces is a big problem, but what about electric guitars? These wonderful inventions decoupled pre-existing instruments from the sounds they produced, and I’d argue that in doing so they not only HEIGHTENED the intimacy between guitarists and their instruments, but paved the way for a beautiful type of audience interaction that even the largest orchestra couldn’t quite get to before. There’s now a rich tradition among electric guitarists of the amplifier as an instrument, which has in turn spawned what’s lovingly referred to as the “wall of sound,” an overpowering musical device that has resulted in the most sublime musical experiences I’ve had. For me, it points to the big-ness of a thing outside my tiny self or the tiny musician or handful of musicians producing the sound, and is the closest humanity has come to replicating the awe-inspiring beauty of a crashing wave.

Side note: I didn’t realize the interlude was also included in this week’s reading until I was about to submit it, so this response largely focuses on chapter 5, but I tried to sprinkle in a bit of my thoughts on the interlude throughout. As another final thought, while I may personally have a different definition of purpose than Ge or Perry Cook that complicates things a bit, I really appreciate their mutual conclusion in the interlude that imprecision in answers to big questions is okay, it’s something I need to remind myself of often, even though it’s baked into the physical nature of the universe. (“That’s Heisenberg’s fault,” as one of my physics professors used to jokingly say.)