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Music, Nature, and Computers: A Showdown
- Wesleyan University Press
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Music, Nature, and Computers A Showdown The Joy of Ugliness Whenever we hear the manipulative sedation of Muzak or witness the visual horror of franchise logos that surround us like wildflowers, we should be grateful. These are high expressions of the side of human nature that is able to stand apart from nature. Ugliness is the apparatus of our ability to have object relations with nature. We are unique among creatures in this respect, and it is only this asset that allows us to open our senses to the beauty of nature. This is the reason I suspect computers will ultimately be considered the best news ever for the ecology movement. People are able to make worse art with computers than without them, which is plain to see and hear. How does computer technology accomplish this feat? To understand this feature of our most revered and metaphor-friendly artifact, we must examine how computers work. EYcient Ugliness Machines Before computers came along, musicians genuinely loved their instruments. Yet my experience has shown that the artists and musicians who do the best work with digital technology hate their tools. Even after forty years of playing an acoustic instrument, a musician will find there is still more to be learned. Mastery does not reduce the mystery. The acoustic instrument is still in part a piece of infinite nature, ever yielding, but never fully conquered. Digital technology, in contrast, can’t make a sound unless it is programmed, and programs can’t exist without freezing a theory into fact. A note in a computer that is used to make music is no longer an interpretation, an instruction, or a model. It’s a real thing—or, more precisely, a mandatory thing—that was once someone’s idea of what a musician should do. (midi [musical interface digital interface] provides one example of this reduction.) This is the exact origin of the bland or nerdy feeling that permeates computer art. We are listening to and repeating our own ideas as they were fixed in programs, instead of confronting mysterious nature. In this way, computers seduce in the most devastating manner by appealing to our narcissism. As an example of their power, I [ 91 ] jaron lanier ⢇ would point out that musical notes didn’t even really exist before computers. They used to be nothing but interpretations of what musicians did. Much Ado about Nothing We live in the information age, but information doesn’t exist. Or, as I put it in the mantra I’ve used to keep myself from getting confused about this for many years, “Information is alienated experience.” Computation can be perceived as happening all around us if we care to look. I grew up near the west Texas town of El Paso, which is bisected by a mountain that I would frequently visit as a kid. At night, the city was a panorama of traYc patterns, and I noticed that there were a few natural oscillators and other circuits present in the city’s streets. So I started designing fantasy cities that implemented various algorithms and came up with a midwest-style town that accomplished a rudimentary Fourier analysis of waves of traYc that came in on the freeway. Now imagine aliens in their flying saucer approaching a city coursing with cars, and ask yourself, “Aren’t they going to be even stranger than I was as a kid?” I mean, they might discover that schools of fish in the ocean are actually calculating large prime numbers by their motions. After all, no computer is perfect—they don’t last forever, and they often crash. Even if they don’t crash, they have bugs, which means they don’t do exactly what we intend for them to do. Why should an alien find what we think is the computer more readily than other candidates that are also performing unintentional computation? There was a wonderful feature in Scientific American some years ago on simple homemade machines that calculate classic problems in computer science, one of which was a string contraption that worked out network traversal problems . Shortly after it was published, I noticed a woman wearing a woven skirt that looked a lot like this contraption, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was inadvertently performing calculations as she flounced by. These musings are significant because they bring that mysterious thing called “meaning” back into the picture after computers and information tried to banish it. How...