(originally posted here∞)

I love reading your posts, Bruce, but thesoundsmith is clearly right in this case. Here's another analogy just for fun:

Joe builds houses. He may not be Frank Lloyd Wright, but he and his customers are happy with the artistry of his architecture and the solidity of his engineering. General contracting is a pretty grueling business that requires dozens of employees; Joe enjoys the synergy of a good team, but damn if assembling one isn't expensive and time-consuming.

As luck would have it, technology has given him the ability to build a house that looks almost as good as a fully-manned project. The tools are expensive (most of them not obscenely so), but the possibility of creativity unencumbered by the demands of 50 other people is very exciting to those who realize its potential. Unfortunately, while these tools bear many similarities to what you'd find on a typical construction site, there are lots of undocumented oddities. Joe normally gets 2 or 3 brands of insulation from a local supply house; he's relieved to be free of stockpiling the cumbersome material but unsure which of the 59 varieties provided with his new toolkit is the right one for the next job, and he doesn't have the time or interest to perform thermal isolation tests on all of them.

Meanwhile, he's trying to learn from people who claim to design load-bearing walls in a couple hours. Joe knows how to draft the framework on graph paper in 30 minutes flat, but the new tools seem to want him to do sketches from 6 different angles in order to convey his true intention, even though his usual stonemasons could figure it out from a few pencil scratchings. He figures there must be a shortcut or three, but RISD doesn't offer this kind of class.




I feel pretty confident about that last claim -- I have an [undergrad] music degree from a school with one of the best graduate programs for modern composition/musicology in the world, and knowing the faculty well I can say it'll be at least a decade before the word GigaSampler is uttered in lecture, if it ever is. Frankly, this is as it should be: the principles of architecture and design Joe learned at RISD were a far better use of his expensive education than the quirks required to workaround the shortcomings of a rapidly-changing genre of computer software. We have profs doing cutting-edge experiments in electronic music, of course, but they're not usually interested in using their talents just to replicate an orchestra -- nor do they have good reason to refocus in that direction, if only because student labor is cheap. I predict that mainstream composition will adopt Giga-style artistry eventually, but recognize that (1) it's not as revolutionary to the field as a whole as CAD/CAM was to engineering (2) the tools we have are not nearly as mature nor widely-used, either.

Let's face the fact that we are a niche market, so as to make it the best niche market it can be :)


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