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Re:The Music of the Future by kevinwang on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @04:20PM (#13232721)
I find it interesting that your comment mentions that restriction in sound leads to better musical creation, and the comment you're replying to remarks that the best electronic performance they saw was one where all the music was composed of one sample
Re:The Music of the Future by rpearl on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @07:15PM (#13233777)
I find it more interesting that the original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231557) found computers "generally very restrictive" and therefore uninteresting for experimentation...

And their reply to mine found computers "unrestrictive" and that they "find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music"

Re:The Music of the Future by beat on Thursday December 22, 2016 @01:10AM (#13235265)
There are good restrictions, and bad restrictions. For example, you might want to program in a strictly typed language, because the restrictions solve other problems. But you might not want to program in FORTRAN, because its restrictions are mostly just painful.

To be more clear, though, I think I should have used the word "expressive" rather than "restrictive". I find it difficult to be expressive with computer-based music. And this is personal - I'm typing this while listening to a friend play an amazing live show with nothing but a Roland MC-808 beat box.

Given a guitar, I can do a lot with just one note, by modulating the timing and tone of that note. But I'm dependent on the direct physical feedback. The indirectness of computer interfaces dismays me. This isn't to say all computers are bad... certainly, I play with digital effects in my chain. My sound passes through computers and still sounds like me. But hopefully you see the point here.