Reading Response #4

to Artful Design • Chapter 4: “Programming + Sound Design”

May-Ann “Gray” Wong

21 October 2023

Music 256A / CS476A, Stanford University

Reading Response: Complexity Through Simplicity

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to Artful Design Principles 4.3 and 4.4, which speak to complexity and coordination of elements both as design as the sum of its parts and the design of its parts itself. Principle 4.3 argues “complexity as the sum of simple elements” (180), and it lends itself to the discussion of what exactly constitutes something complex and something simple. Perhaps this is also the discourse that Paul Lansky’s Homebrew presents, where things that we normally would consider “simple” are only really simple out of familiarity; because an object or occurrence is prescribed normal, everyday, or mundane, it loses much of its mystery and complexity. By Lansky estranging the context of the sounds, he reminds us of the complexity of the everyday and reverts us back to a sort of child-like state where everything was new, everything was strange, everything was complex. Listening to “Table’s Clear” reminded me of this: that, really, the everyday is just as worthy of being considered complex, nuanced, and so on, especially given the rich history that it took to arrive at its current form and design. Blanketing it under the “simple” label on the basis that it might be commonplace discounts the complexity that led to its discovery.

This, of course, is very similar to the discourse surrounding Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and what was posed to the class about the boundaries of design. And I think that Lansky does an excellent job of continuing this conversation in the music world; a spoon can be every much of an instrument as a violin is. As a result, I am left wondering what exactly the border between simple and complex is. Additionally, I wonder if complexity is something that can be conferred to its parts or to the whole. Of course in the book, the THX Deep Note sound is a good example of the simple (a collection of individual voices) resulting in the complex (a trademarked unique sound!), but what about something simple-sounding that is a result of its complex components? For example, what about a complex arrangement of sounds that is passed through a filter and made more simple-sounding in the end? Would that still be complexity as the sum of simple elements?

On a separate note, Principle 4.4 states that the key to “creating complexity from simple elements” is “local independence” and “global coordination” (180), however this sounds awfully similar to the definition of any given network: a network of cells, computers, subways. It makes me wonder if any sort of network is conferred complexity as a result of this principle? Of course, complexity from simple elements doesn’t translate into artful design necessarily, so it also makes me wonder about this sort of juxtaposition between complexity through the simple and the sublime through artful design. Is the complex necessarily closer to being sublime? Or is that which is simple even closer to the sublime?