Reading Response 4

Wesley Larlarb

To me the most interesting implication of chapter 4 was the idea that computer music is its own unique medium with unique technical strengths and weaknesses and therefore that the most artful way to make music with computers is not to copy existing non-computer music, but rather to create something new which harnesses the medium. This is a bit of a break from how I’m used to thinking about making music on a computer, since I’m very used to working in Logic on producing my own music, and the goal of my production in Logic has always been at some level to emulate the sounds I like in existing computer-produced music. However, it seems like the ethos of chapter 4 is less targeted at conventional music production and more at an experimental, boundary pushing ideal of computer music. When I think about the THX sound effect, or Homebrew by Paul Lansky, I become more convinced of the idea that amazing sounds can be produced on a computer that are relatively divorced from any prior ideas of genre or style, but which instead arise from simple, repeated mathematical calculations and component parts like comb filters, sound banks, sine waves and so on. 

All this being said, as a longtime student of music and music history in a sense which is fairly independent from my interest in computers, I don’t know if I’ll ever gravitate naturally toward this sensibility of using computers in a way which is not predicated on any preexisting genre, since to me it tends to be tradition itself which makes music interesting. If we think of music as similar to language, then I would argue strongly against the idea that it is a universal one! Musical tradition differs in an incredibly meaningful, nuanced way between communities across space and time; while styles have relatedness in the same way that say languages do, I wouldn’t say they are mutually intelligible. If we extend this analogy to computer music, then it seems to me that in order to be emotionally compelling, computer music must at some level stem from preexisting genres, and indeed we can see that perhaps the most popular “computer music,” modern EDM, maintains many familiar elements of non-electronic Western music (Western harmony, beat conceptions, song structures, etc.).

After considering both perspectives, the medium-focused, boundary-pushing computer music experimentalist, and the style-focused, tradition-emulating modern music producer, it strikes me that perhaps the most interesting music to be made with a computer would be something that reinterprets traditional stylistic elements of an existing genre, but does so in a way which harnesses the unique capabilities of a computer to take things to a logical extreme.