Interesting that this film was scored by Raymond Scott, the composer and inventor that did the scoring under Looney Tunes, and developed technologies as the Orchestra Machine (Orchestrion), the Clavivox, and the Electronium (one of them apparently in the possession of Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo)
It is amusingly ironic that from a composer scoring what is essentially a kind of infomercial, the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) was analogous to the IBM MT/ST, allowing the user make series of non-destructive edits, and then mixdown (print) a final copy.
When the discussion ultimately redounds to the separation of what machines and what humans do, it is not necessarily text processing that we mechanize. Machines have made music composition more secretarial or more like word processing, or with sampling, like a Cuisinart.
Machines become abstractions when their purpose is not well defined. Machines may be designed as tools, but they are animate objects in the sense that they are in the loop between ideas (thinking) and final product.
With the merging of man and machine not too far way (The Singularity) we will consult more an more with machine thinking, as we always have in the past. Machines are embedded in the processing chain between ideas and product, whether it be music or text or food. If a machine generates an interesting idea, it is essentially doing some of the thinking for us. How will we react when machines can in fact come up with better ideas?
0 comments:
Post a Comment