Reading Response #4 to Artful Design • Chapter 4: “Programmability & Sound Design”
Sami Wurm
Oct. 23th, 2022
Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University
Reading Response: Design Falls Away
From this week’s reading, I’d like to respond to Artful Design Principle 4.9, which states:
Principle 4.9: The Purpose of a Computer is to do Something Else:
Technology is ALWAYS a means-to-an-end and NEVER an end-in-itself.
This principle really captured the ethos of the whole chapter for me: good design falls away, leading to a meaningful experience in which we no longer necessarily notice the medium encompassing our experience. This thought was especially exemplified to me in the section about Paul Lanksy’s album Homebrew and how his use and re-imagination of world sounds was somehow both “familiar and fantastical” (page 182). He used technology as a means to an end to enhance a natural phenomenon (world noise), in a way that yielded a result that would not be possible without technology. However, the point of the project was not the technology itself, but the beauty of the noises of the world around us.
This passage reminded me of an interview I have watched many times with John Cage, “John Cage About Silence.” In this interview, he talks about how he feels that too many songs today do not sound like ‘music’ to him, but like noise in which the speaker is trying to say something, so desperately, that they drown away the sounds and music otherwise around them. He talks about how silence is music to him. How natural, everyday sounds and moments of peace are music to him. How music is a state of mind. When I think about this notion that music is a state of mind, it makes sense to me that we, as technological innovators, may sometimes take away from sound’s natural beauty and go too far trying to add a million things to what is already a message in itself. Sounds are a message in themselves, and illicit feelings by themselves. If our goal as creators is to elicit feelings and curate experiences/aesthetics, it is important to notice and be grateful for what we already have and what we are working with.
As somewhat of a maximalist in my work (I can never stop adding new harmonies, effects, and filters), I feel this is an important message to me. This is not to say that we should not, as Principle 4.8 says, Experiment to Illogical Extremes! I think the only way that fun, new innovations in the music and technological spaces will come about is through great risk taking, mistakes, and experimentation. However, I believe that after experimenting, it is grounding to remember the overall goal of creation, which is (once again) to create a human experience of feeling. Not to show off a million patches and effects and tech gadgets etc (although sometimes that can work and be super fun and effective in portraying your message). At the end of the day, implementing artful design principles should make the technology that we use not the point of our work, but rather a seamless vessel of delivery of some greater message.