Do We Loose Something In Working With Technology?

[starise]

Back in the day there was no ITB.  All music was played on instruments we could hold. I  feel a lack of that connection sometimes  in working with alternate input devices. I guess the most recent thing that caused me to pause in thought was getting an iPad Pro and loading composition software on it. Using the fake keyboard to input the midi just felt artificial and fake. Nothing like holding a real guitar or touching real keys. I began to feel I was loosing something in the translation between it ( the iPad) and me.

 

Anyone else experience this feeling? Something about vibrations in air speak to me more as a musician. Hearing the tones as they come out in my space. Feeling real tactile keys that hit a real piano string and hearing that. Nothing seems to surpass this feeling in the electronic world. 

 

To me, making these creations sound real in an artificial environment seems a bit off in some way. 

[Rudi]

An iPad is a clumsy tool (I do have one). Its a multi-purpose device and Apple cannot know what developers will use it for.

 

A musical instrument has one purpose. Its design has been refined over generations. Also you and I have spent years refining our playing skills using them.

 

Electronic sounds are less personal. Useful though!

[Mahesh]

I feel the same way about reading e-books instead of the real ones. It's not just the sentimental value but also the factor of how it stimulates your sense of touch. Having said that, is creativity lost if you're using a digital instrument? I'm not so sure. I know that if I learn an efficient way to use it, I can make music just as well. Do I want to? Now that is a question of personal preference.

[Avit Hammer]

We could  do with losing an O for a start 😀

 

I actually gain by using technology. My playing skills are a bit naff but technology allows me to edit my playing... or if I play a riff spot on (rare) I can loop it. My singing is improved massively by auto tune so for me the finished article is only achieved through the use of technology ..

[geographyhorse]

I think it depends on what you want your art to say. A postmodern reflection on lost futures in the digital age seems to demand an artificial feel or representation. A celebration of skill calls for actual proficiency with an instrument. Then there's the whole gamut of stuff in between. I've seen YouTube videos bemoaning the loss of classical. Yet, if you're willing to put in the work and look, there's a thriving classical community and contemporary composers still making classical music. Thomas Ades' Catch is from 1993. You also have stuff from Steve Reich in 70s. There's also the impossibly gorgeous Continuum written by Jane Antonia Cornish and performed by Decoda. The Nocturne are wonderful. My point is, music on real instruments will never die, just as no genre has ever actually died. Things morph and change with time and it's on us, the listeners, to seek it out. I'll finish with suggesting that of there's something that you strongly feel is lacking in music. Then it's on you, the artist, to birth it into existence. 😜

[john]

Technology has been at the centre of so many musical innovations. People have asked the same thing about every single one of them. They question the creation of the synthesiser. They questioned the electrification of the guitar. They questioned the various stages of the evolution of the piano. I suspect the question was asked when log drummers first thought to stretch animal skin over a wooden shell.

 

I think you lose something when what is learned using previous music tech is bypassed, and then forgotten. For musicians at the transition, you carry with you the knowledge of that former tech. It bleeds from one tech to the other. We try to apply previous knowledge and experience using that new tech and gradually new methodologies emerge, and tools are used at specific times for specific purposes. Often it is survival of the fittest, but sometimes we keep using both.

 

Where we do lose is when laziness dominates, where convenience wins over art.

 

Where we collectively lose out is in the new generation who only know that new tech and don’t bother to learn the lessons of previous tech. I don’t know any guitarists who bothered learning the lute, for example... but I know many who play both acoustic guitar and the electric guitar.. which is one of those few examples where both old and new remain popular... largely due to the instruments and applications being quite different and complimentary. The closer the tech the more likely the survivor (not always the new tech) will replace the old tech, not sit beside it.

 

Of course iPads etc are general tech that augment the working environment, or have some sort of music making application often based on leveraging someone else’s knowledge or skills. For example a loop based sequencer. Such apps allow even unskilled (though sometimes inspired) users to create music that their lack of musical skill in other arenas just wouldn’t allow. It is here, more than in other ways, that such music tech provides the possibility of creating something reasonable based upon nothing other than the creator’s taste. They need no skill at all. That is an issue in science almost as much as music these days, though I will grant you that the contrast in the music arena is much more stark.

 

No amount of telling people that they are best served by learning at least the fundamentals will encourage them to spend time on something that feels glacial and distant in terms of the results versus effort. In this day and age of speed and convenience, skill development is an under-represented choice or outcome.

 

Just saying

[Roymega]

the disconnect comes from you, not the technology... Technology is an instrument itself, it can only do what you make it do, so the perceived limitation begins and ends with you. I think technology threatens a lot of musicians, especially if they didn't decide to adopt it early on in their musical endeavors, or unable to because it wasn't available or was too expensive, but to say that you somehow lose something in the process is a lazy way of saying you don't know how to make it sound the way you want.

[Rudi]

15 hours ago, Roymega said:

the disconnect comes from you, not the technology... Technology is an instrument itself, it can only do what you make it do, so the perceived limitation begins and ends with you. I think technology threatens a lot of musicians, especially if they didn't decide to adopt it early on in their musical endeavors, or unable to because it wasn't available or was too expensive, but to say that you somehow lose something in the process is a lazy way of saying you don't know how to make it sound the way you want.

 

Obviously neither Tim nor I have made our points sufficiently well.

[MikeRobinson]

Virtually everything was condemned as "technology" at one time or another, including the piano and especially the player piano ... until some innovative composer created music by manually punching holes in rolls of paper, enabling him to realize "piano music" that could not be played by people.  (The very first "sequencer?")

 

Technology, though, is simply the makings of the instrument.  It's what you do with it that makes music.

[starise]

I think my dilemma has more to do with instruments that move real air as opposed to instruments that don't.  I'm not against technology, nor am I lazy.. I have and use lots of tech.  I think I might compare some of the music tech to a drive by wire car or airplane. Something that takes our input, converts it in some way and and gives a result based on both our decisions and the decisions it makes. Don't know if you've ever stomped the brake pedal of a vehicle equipped with anti-lock brakes sliding in snow. The brake module is supposed to make you brake safer by  applying the brakes thousands of times a second to avoid an uncontrolled slide. What the driver feels is a total loss of control as compared to braking on the old system. After you press that pedal, it makes the decisions which aren't always the best.

 

For instance, a midi keyboard might have four zones of sensitivity. A real piano has unlimited zones of sensitivity. There's also the issue of latency, there is none playing an acoustic instrument. Midi instruments commonly have 5 to 10ms or more of latency all depending on the computer and the interface.

 

For me, it isn't that the technology is bad, it's that I don't think it always captures the full expression I gave it. I suspect this also carries over into the realm of plugins and the reason why some swear that the older analog studio gear made better recordings. This highlights the difference between some of the older tech and some of the more recent tech. The older circuits responded immediately as a whole while digital technology requires conversions to be made from digital to analog and analog to digital. I know one guitarist using a thunderbolt interface who claims he has the latency down to 1ms using guitar amp software. That's actually quite good if true.