Emily Saletan RR6 (Interlude)

Part of the interlude of Artful Design (page 298) discusses “endgame” – or the purpose of design, specifically with regards to the invention and development of musical instruments using technology. Page 305 also details the perversion of design through consumerism, and the elitism it facilitates. I think this balance between consumerism and accessibility is quite the puzzle when building tools. An earlier chapter of the book emphasized that instrument designers should build the piece rather than the instrument. At the same time, is there any differentiation between a tool that serves only one purpose in only one context by one person (perhaps being the process of creation, or perhaps being a performance) and a tool that can serve many purposes in many contexts by many people? It makes me curious about the interactions between a self-motivated process and the rest of the world, especially in a field such as art. As Cook and Wang go back and forth philosophically iterating on the direction that these forms of design are traveling towards, they remark on how the form of a computer and its innate malleability impacts the intent of the resulting tools. This makes computer music somewhat less of a committal process than it is to invent or play generalized instruments.

Cook explains that sometimes it’s more useful to, at a certain point, stop the editing process and learn to play the computer instrument as it is. This practice somewhat mirrors the learning and playing of a more conventional or popularized instrument. This ties into a theme that is echoed throughout the book about how malleability (or designability) is both a blessing and a curse. For example, the chapter emphasizes how easy it is to change the entire world of the instrument by just writing or adjusting a few lines of code. The instrument becomes incredibly personalized to both the artist and the project they are working on creating. There is power in this adaptability – the artist develops so much more agency over the work by additionally having agency over the medium. I was also taken by the idea of beauty as truth, which might often lead to experiences that are more simple by virtue of being so self-evident. The demutualizing of mechanism and product in the electronic space is one such place in which simplicity can get lost. I wonder what the main factors are in determining what’s truthful in an environment where nearly anything, if not everything, is possible. What I most took away from this chapter was the comparison between computer instruments that have externalized hardware and computer instruments that reside in the generalized form. Much of Cook’s work is specified by its physical manifestation: the lettuce maraca, or the fillup glass, or the coffee mug, or the rainbow array of rubber chickens. There are general yet specific and humorous synthesizers like the Otamatone publicly available. What makes the Otamatone an instrument to be marketed?