[HN Gopher] Computers and Creativity
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Computers and Creativity
Author : dayve
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-03-24 07:06 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mollymielke.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mollymielke.com)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > In part for these reasons, DAWs are widely loved by their users
| and serve as a shining example of software making very little
| assumptions about the user's creative workflows. Instead, DAWs
| accommodate numerous paths to reach a desired outcome, in
| addition to providing the resources and community to teach the
| user how to create any missing feature themself.
|
| This is amazingly wrong. DAWs are notorious for imposing a
| specific workflow, and users will select a DAW specifically for
| some new workflow it has produced. For example, Ableton rose to
| prominence largely due to its unusual alternative workflow option
| (the grid) which made it popular on the DJ scene. Other DAWs have
| workflows and tools which make them popular with composers
| (Cubase for example) or tinkerers (Bitwig, Reason, etc.).
| tartoran wrote:
| That is correct in my own experience. I started composing music
| using DAWs and little did I know that was only one limited way,
| creatively speaking, of getting things done. Yes, using DAWs,
| one can tweak, modify, prefect mistakes, etc. But all that
| comes at a cost, the cost being the creative part is largely
| compromised, and I find that the abundance of options make DAW
| first time users think they've hit the jackpot when in fact,
| creatively speaking, less is more and their creative growth
| would be facilitated by simpler tools. When artists lack a
| certain skill technology can easily fill that void. Initially
| it seems like the best deal but the cost is large and the
| sooner they find that out the better they can get to doing real
| meaningful work. Technology in art in large proportion becomes
| an artifice that is very attractive but by itself isn't very
| meaningful.
| mettamage wrote:
| Having used Fruity Loops, Reason, Cubase and Ableton back in
| the day as a kid, I agree.
|
| Reason + Cubase linked together was a lot of fun :)
| andagainagain wrote:
| Deleted
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| The general understanding on HN is that it is poor form to
| criticize the style rather than the content of your post. This
| expectation is not difficult to meet.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| andagainagain wrote:
| Good call, thank you
| zabzonk wrote:
| This is full of nonsense. For example:
|
| > However, a new way of thinking about these machines began to
| emerge in the late 1980s. From the punch card came the
| spreadsheet
|
| Spreadsheets were in no way derived from punch cards (except in
| the sense that everything was), and the first widely used
| spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was developed and released in the late
| 1970s.
| rektide wrote:
| > Ultimately, I will be arguing that to foster optimal human
| innovation, digital creative tools need to be interoperable,
| moldable, efficient, and community-driven.
|
| Huzzah!! Yesss! Sing it loud. There's other who believe
| similarly. The Malleable Systems Collective[1] for example! From
| their opening words:
|
| > Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only
| function in preset ways determined by some far away team.
| Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten
| many times over rather than recomposed.
|
| This idea/aspiration of ever-enrichening imminently-flexible
| ecosystems is mirrored in my reply to the recent The
| Dispassionate Developer[2], where I argue my hopes that systems
| be more open ended & allow more people access & participation.
|
| [1] https://malleable.systems/
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26551529
| rektide wrote:
| Does anyone have suggestions for this post? I write optimistic
| hopeful pieces like this a lot, that espouse positive virtues,
| and so often they end up downvoted, sometimes heavily. It feels
| like such an alien hostile force is out there, dark negative
| forces silently bringing only downvotes out from the dark
| forest. A silent world that doesn't have any positive values,
| that rejects cooperation & positivity. How can I make these
| words less disagreeable? Or are my grim assessment perhaps too
| real?
|
| It just feels so cheap, that negativity is so free, that snark
| is just seems overflowing in most comments, and that's what
| seems to attract support. Like the case here, I want to see a
| more open, unlimited mentality. Instead it just feels like
| everyone's looking for fuel to burn.
| carapace wrote:
| "If they didn't laugh, it wouldn't be the Tao."
|
| https://www.egreenway.com/taoism/ttclz41.htm
|
| AKA "Don't let the turkeys get you down."
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This is plausibly written, but the author has piled buzzwords on
| commonplace platitudes, and hasn't bothered to familiarise
| themselves with the literature on Computational Creativity.
| (Namechecks: Margaret Boden, Anna Jordanous, Geraint Wiggins, and
| others.)
|
| The Association for Computational Creativity is holding its 12th
| annual conference this year, and this reads as if the author has
| never heard of them.
|
| I almost LOLd when I read that "no tool exemplifies moldability
| better than music digital audio workstations." DAWs are the
| _antithesis_ of moldability. They force you to think of audio in
| the same way that a 70s /80s studio engineer thought of audio,
| but with time-saving virtualisation and automation. They're
| almost entirely closed to any context-aware semantic editing or
| creation.
|
| So... superficially researched, and not an inspiring piece.
| [deleted]
| buza wrote:
| I thought that surely some mention of end user programming
| would have been warranted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-
| user_development
| elefanten wrote:
| It looks like the final project from an industry-oriented
| masters program. So, yeah, it's not going to be real research,
| it's going to be whatever a time-strapped, semi-interested
| person can scrape together to jump through yet another career
| hoop.
| auto wrote:
| So, I was doing well with this until I hit this line, which
| literally stopped me in my tracks and caused me to reread it and
| the context several times to see if I missed something:
|
| > Collaborative software as we know it was born soon after in the
| form of Google Sheets, the first simultaneous multiplayer
| software.
|
| What?
| slx26 wrote:
| Ok, first addressing the common complaints:
|
| - Yeah, DAWs suck, poor example, let's ignore this.
|
| - The title is probably not very well chosen, as some other
| commenters highlighted by focusing a lot on creativity on itself.
| The actual piece seems to try to focus more on making computers
| better platforms for the practice of creativity, not so much
| about the creative limits of computers on themselves.
|
| - This is a technical crowd, and the piece is more about "what
| would be nice", so no point bothering that much on technical
| issues.
|
| I actually agree with the main point, but indeed, just saying
| "what would be nice" is not that helpful. For the point on
| standarization, I think a better, more technical and actionable
| framing, would be to try to port the concept of _type safety_
| from languages to specs and APIs. While there 's some kind of
| informal consensus on the main types that are used everywhere, if
| we could (yeah, this is a massive leap, but I'm only trying to
| illustrate the idea) pass "specs" into functions in type-safe
| languages, just like we can pass complex functions as parameters
| in many modern languages, and we could automatize to some degree
| compliance and testing, that would be awesome. So, not so much
| about standarization, but about a new abstraction level, making
| the interoperability of computational systems type safe. I think
| about something as common as urls, and I tell to myself: this is
| such an unsafe mess. Even if a spec is technically well defined,
| translating that into code is too much.
|
| The other general point, moldability, might be better expressed
| as "accessibility". Making systems more accessible to users. But
| I think besides many poor software tools made in a rush for
| specific interests, we are already doing decently here when we
| really try. It's only that big companies that make the big
| products usually have too much inertia to continue doing certain
| things the same way they have been done in the last 40 years
| (most DAWs are a good example as many commenters pointed out),
| and smaller actors don't have enough resources to make complex
| tools that are much cooler than what we have. But on this aspect,
| I don't think the obstacles are that significant.
|
| Oh, and on a final note, nice writing (even if it wanders a bit
| too much sometimes) and really beautiful design. Even the html is
| pretty readable.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| If I were writing on the history of this topic, I would start 80
| years earlier with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace - Babbage saw
| his general-purpose computer as a mathematical equation solver,
| while Ada Lovelace (who was originally hired to translate his
| lecture [1]) envisioned the creative use cases that general-
| purpose computing would eventually have.
|
| [1]
| https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...
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