Creativity
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On Techlust: Native Instruments’ Maschine
I’m at Tekserve, in the audio department, and I spot a beauty: Native Instruments’ Maschine, a hardware-software rhythm machine. I move in for a closer inspection. Its top is made of metal and I run my fingers across the smooth, cool brushed surface. I pick up the musical object off the display table and assess… Continue reading
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On Marcus Boon’s In Praise Of Copying
Marcus Boon’s recent book, In Praise Of Copying (Harvard University Press, 2010), is a timely argument in favor of our freedom to freely copy one another in the name of healthy creativity. Boon, a professor of literature at York University (as well as a DJ and contributor to Wire magazine) notes that the word copy derives from the Latin “copia” which means… Continue reading
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On The Most Human Human
In his book The Most Human Human, an engaging account of competing in the annual Turing test, Brian Christian ranges far and wide through the literature of AI (artificial intelligence), linguistics, computer science, philosophy and even poetry to figure out what exactly makes us distinctly human and distinctly different from machines. The Turing test was conceived by Alan Turing,… Continue reading
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On David Sudnow’s Ways Of The Hand
They don’t seem to make books like David Sudnow’s Ways Of The Hand anymore, but then, Sudnow, who died in 2007, was no ordinary explorer of musical experience. Trained as a sociologist, Sudnow took a turn inward in the late 1970s and wrote Ways Of The Hand (1978/2001), a remarkable insider’s phenomenological account of learning to improvise jazz… Continue reading
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Electronic Music and Gaming Theory
In this week’s New Yorker there is an article by Nick Paumgarten on the Japanese video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto that unpacks the magic behind such Miyamoto game creations such as Super Mario Bros. and Legend Of Zelda. Game designing is a creative endeavor that few people besides Miyamoto have mastered. (Though the American Will Wright, designer of Sims and… Continue reading
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Creative Strategies From elBulli’s Cookery
This blog post is not about music or sound per se, but about the creative process of cooking. I am a big fan of books about cookery, and they can be read from a sideways perspective–thinking by analogy about how they may offer insight onto other domains. With that said, every once in a while you… Continue reading
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Sound Exploring
If you make electronic music of any type you can’t get around the inescapable fact of needing and wanting to explore new sounds. Back in the early days of electronic music–think Stockhausen, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky–making electronic sounds was a laborious process. One had to layer sine tones, or manipulate magnetic tape, or deal… Continue reading
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Making Musical Systems Public
Over the years, a lot of electronic musicians have shrouded their work in a veil of mystery: they tell us very little about how they make their music–the tools the use, their working methods, and so forth. We are reminded of vinyl DJs back in the day who would cover up the labels on their… Continue reading
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C.Wright Mills: On Intellectual Craftsmanship
“Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same time for comprehensiveness.” – C. Wright Mills Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962) was an American sociologist best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination (which is still in print). For me, one remarkable aspect of the book is its Appendix, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” Here Mills… Continue reading
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On Autechre: Exercising The Materiality Of Machine Music
I don’t think of a sound in my head and try and find it on the keyboard. I just find the sound on the keyboard. -Sean Booth, Autechre Have you ever listened to the music of Autechre? They are a UK-based electronic music duo that has been releasing their unique brand of adventurously experimental and probing techno music… Continue reading
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