Musing Versus Music

 

Back in the 90s I wrote an essay titled Musing Versus Music, in which I suggested coming up with a new term, “musicist”—like a physicist that studies music. So when you’re a musicist you’re not only focused on performance and composition, you’re interested in a lot of different areas—you’re interested in the overlaps with other technologies. In the 90s we were 15 years into sampling at that point.  

In the early 80s, music programs started to decline and schools weren’t investing in instruments, and consequently people had to define their own instruments. In fact, this has been the case since the 1960s when traditional music education was supplanted by popular music. Teens were buying guitars, basses, and amps rather than flutes, oboes, and bassoons. They may have played these instruments as children and probably could sight-read at some level, so formal music study was still very much alive. Two or three generations later, people are still very interested in learning music but it’s in a different way—they’re approaching it in a musicist’s way—almost like a science.

You can come up with some interesting art as a musicist. But the interesting thing for me was that the instrument itself had started to become less relevant and now it’s the computer, coding, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and the internet itself that people are using as instruments as “musicists”. So it remains to be seen how this is going to evolve and whether traditional instruments are going to be incorporated in the admixture. So far I haven’t seen it. Musical instrument manufacturers are starting to use artificial intelligence as a way to remain current. But as I’ve said in many other videos, over the past decade I haven’t seen much of an evolution or development to something that actually results in something sounding different. 

The analogy I always use is cubism: In order for these new technologies to really make an effect you have to recognize it immediately as something you’ve never experienced before. That certainly was the case when we started using samplers and turntables, but it’s been 20 or 25 years now and is totally baked in the cake now. So it’s the skills of the musicist, not the musician anymore.

9/14/2021

[9/14/2024: AI is making us all “ists” of some kind–less artists and more scientists because we are not using our hands to create, other than clicking, swiping, selecting, typing…Playing strings or a sax is a totally different experience for the brain–and a better one in my view].