I was a MA/MST student at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics.
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I was going through some old notes, and came across something I jotted down ten years ago during a rare moment of calm during my undergraduate studies when I was reading in one of Caltech's libraries. It is a quote by Claude Shannon from "Shannon: Collected Papers" and is probably my favorite quote by anybody ever. So I, without permission but in good faith and under the belief that this is Fair Use, will reproduce it for you here: "I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal. I like to solve new problems all the time. I keep asking myself, how would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine to do that? Can you prove this theorem? These are my kinds of problems. Not because I am going to do something useful." Ok, so if I take an excerpt like that I need to connect it to computer music, right? Let's go. Something I struggled a lot with, and still do at times, is justifying spending energy on computer music or even music at all. There are a lot of people for whom the value of music is self-evident, and those people aren't quite the audience of this post (but feel free to continue reading!). For some others, there is a clear hierarchy of "valuable" technical work. Perhaps at the top of the hierarchy are things like applied physics, chemical and electrical engineering, bio-medical, etc. Robots are pretty big nowadays. Things where you see an impact or some cool demonstration that screams "science" or "progress" at you. Then maybe a bit lower are more abstract things that are hard to understand but seem to be done by smart people, like mathematics or theoretical natural sciences. Far below that are fields like the arts and humanities, where music would be grouped (note that I graduated from the school of music at Stanford). There is an obvious problem with this way of thinking once you start to look into things, at least from the CCRMA perspective. Many of these divisions are arbitrary and unnecessary. The technology behind Auto-Tune was originally used for oil drilling. The same Golay codes used in GPS can be used for room acoustic measurements. There is plenty of cool technology and science in computer music, and bleed-through can happen both ways. It might seem counter-intuitive to just focus on whatever comes to mind and expect great things to fall out naturally, but I observed a lot of people at CCRMA seem to do exactly that. I think it's less random chance and more that if you're always solving new problems and thinking about things in new ways you're going to be that much more prepared for when you are forced to solve problems and think in new ways to accomplish your goals. Use it or lose it (talking about your brain here). So if you're interested in computer music, or really anything at all, don't worry too much about how useful your work is going to be. Just do what comes naturally, and solve new problems all the time. Maybe easier said than done, but I guess that's why we're not all Claude Shannons. Yet.