256a Reading Response 2

Wesley Larlarb

I found the second chapter of Artful Design interesting because it relates closely to many of my own projects in terms of the kinds of tools I have tried to build, but also the deeper vision quest which I see myself on. In particular, I find myself drawn to the idea of music as a real time performance art taking place in a communal setting, and I feel the impacts of recording technology coupled with the internet and ubiquitous computing every day when I watch youtube videos and listen to recordings of other people playing live with each other. There’s something about that spark of live musical interaction which keeps drawing me back to these videos, and yet at the same time I find that sometimes I find myself turning off my computer and going to sleep with this deep feeling of loneliness. Sometimes it’s with my closest friends and family nearby that I feel the most alone in this way, because it’s so painfully obvious how little they can understand what I’m playing, let alone communicate something meaningful back to me. I see music as a language with a grammar, a vocabulary, and semantic meaning on the deepest emotional plane I know how to access, and when people near me can’t understand that language or reply, it can be like telling an intensely personal story to a room of people you thought cared about you and being met with silent incomprehension.

By contrast, there are moments I’ve shared with my band members at Stanford and back home that made me feel so integrated into a community that it didn’t seem like anything else in the world could possibly matter. While I’m certainly friends with these folks, they aren’t always my closest friends, and many of them don’t know much at all about my life outside of music. But despite this I’ve been able to feel deeply understood and wanted by them in a way that reminds me of the feeling I get when my dad cooks me a birthday dinner, or my girlfriend asks me if I want to dance, or my best friend shares an interesting idea he’s been thinking about. It’s a feeling that for me comes so much stronger from real-time semi-improvised musical interaction with another human, compared to listening to recordings. Don’t get me wrong, I love listening to highly composed, rehearsed, and produced music, and I’ve tried my hand at creating plenty of my own. But the reality is that in the society I grew up in, upper middle class white/Asian America, 99% of people’s experience with music is consuming recordings which were created by the best 1% of moments that the most “musically capable” 1% of people could record and then edit to perfection. Imagine if 99% of people’s experience with speech was listening to manufactured pre-written dialogues created by the best 1% of speakers, of which they then recorded 100s of takes and intensely trimmed, resampled, filtered, and otherwise edited to transform into completely different voices, in effect rendering complex language production to be an unnecessary skill for most people. What kind of joyless world would that be? Of course such an existence will never come to be so long as we continue to value language as a practical tool for economic coordination… the language of emails, of diplomas and course syllabi—god forbid we should not be able to understand commercials! 

That being said, I wonder if somewhere along the way we lost the value of a shared musical language as a tool for emotional connection and validation. Just as listening to a recorded podcast is different from telling a story to a friend, listening to a Kendrick Lamar album is a categorically different experience from freestyling with some other people standing right next to you. I hope that maybe, if real-time digital audio interaction becomes more feasible over the internet, there can be a way for technology itself to bring together all the kids like young me, and that maybe they could play together, starting a new musical language of the internet, and with it ushering in a new age of connectedness, understanding, nuance, and ultimately meaning for humans. hopium.