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Computers and Creativity

71 pointsby dayveabout 4 years ago

10 comments

SeanLukeabout 4 years ago
&gt; 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.<p>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.).
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TheOtherHobbesabout 4 years ago
This is plausibly written, but the author has piled buzzwords on commonplace platitudes, and hasn&#x27;t bothered to familiarise themselves with the literature on Computational Creativity. (Namechecks: Margaret Boden, Anna Jordanous, Geraint Wiggins, and others.)<p>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.<p>I almost LOLd when I read that &quot;no tool exemplifies moldability better than music digital audio workstations.&quot; DAWs are the <i>antithesis</i> of moldability. They force you to think of audio in the same way that a 70s&#x2F;80s studio engineer thought of audio, but with time-saving virtualisation and automation. They&#x27;re almost entirely closed to any context-aware semantic editing or creation.<p>So... superficially researched, and not an inspiring piece.
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zabzonkabout 4 years ago
This is full of nonsense. For example:<p>&gt; However, a new way of thinking about these machines began to emerge in the late 1980s. From the punch card came the spreadsheet<p>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.
autoabout 4 years ago
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:<p>&gt; Collaborative software as we know it was born soon after in the form of Google Sheets, the first simultaneous multiplayer software.<p>What?
slx26about 4 years ago
Ok, first addressing the common complaints:<p>- Yeah, DAWs suck, poor example, let&#x27;s ignore this.<p>- 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.<p>- This is a technical crowd, and the piece is more about &quot;what would be nice&quot;, so no point bothering that much on technical issues.<p>I actually agree with the main point, but indeed, just saying &quot;what would be nice&quot; 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 <i>type safety</i> from languages to specs and APIs. While there&#x27;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&#x27;m only trying to illustrate the idea) pass &quot;specs&quot; 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.<p>The other general point, moldability, might be better expressed as &quot;accessibility&quot;. 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&#x27;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&#x27;t have enough resources to make complex tools that are much cooler than what we have. But on this aspect, I don&#x27;t think the obstacles are that significant.<p>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.
egypturnashabout 4 years ago
I am a professional artist and I just wanna note that the idea of users being able to customize the fuck out of their tools is all well and good, but realistically:<p>It takes multiple years of focused effort to get good at the <i>other</i> skills involved in using a tool.<p>And it takes no small amount of investment of time and energy to get to the point where you have the <i>programming</i> skills to <i>modify</i> the tool.<p>Plus of course the inner calculations of &quot;will trying to modify this thing be likely to find any success before I have spent more time trying to hack it than I will ever save by doing this&quot; need to at least <i>look</i> like they will come up favorably.<p>I mean, someone in the community is probably gonna have that combination, this past month I&#x27;ve been looking at picking up Adobe Animate for the first time in like 15 years to do some animation, and I went looking for plugins for it and found a few paid plugins made by a dude who started working in the animation scene around the same time I did, and never left it; this man has clearly found a <i>lot</i> of pain points in the process of cranking out the footage in Flash&#x2F;Animate and built plugins to fix those holes long before Adobe could be bothered (and it sounds like there are a <i>lot</i> of unlicensed copies of his plugins floating around studios, too), and if I find this one animation gig I&#x27;m being coaxed out of retirement to be enough fun that I wanna take a few more, you can bet your <i>ass</i> that I&#x27;m gonna give this dude like sixty bucks for his well-polished patches in Adobe&#x27;s UI rather than spending the time getting up to speed on making Animate plugins.<p>And this is coming from someone who hangs out on HN and has a tidy little collection of homebrew scripts for Illustrator, the art tool she spends most of her creative time in.
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primitivesuaveabout 4 years ago
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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;periodicals&#x2F;convergence&#x2F;mathematical-treasure-ada-lovelaces-notes-on-the-analytic-engine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;periodicals&#x2F;convergence&#x2F;mathematic...</a>
rektideabout 4 years ago
&gt; Ultimately, I will be arguing that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools need to be interoperable, moldable, efficient, and community-driven.<p>Huzzah!! Yesss! Sing it loud. There&#x27;s other who believe similarly. The Malleable Systems Collective[1] for example! From their opening words:<p>&gt; 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.<p>This idea&#x2F;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 &amp; allow more people access &amp; participation.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malleable.systems&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malleable.systems&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26551529" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26551529</a>
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huachimingoabout 4 years ago
You guys could read &quot;Tools for Conviviality&quot;[1] by Ivan Illich (1973). He talks about how tools could be more limited and useful to the person rather than make a person slave of the tool (he repeats this idea a lot). It expands on a previous idea of Deschooling Society.<p>Those ideas inspired the making of the first personal computer btw[2]. [1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ia801707.us.archive.org&#x2F;29&#x2F;items&#x2F;illich-conviviality&#x2F;Illich_Conviviality.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ia801707.us.archive.org&#x2F;29&#x2F;items&#x2F;illich-conviviality...</a> [2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lee_Felsenstein#Life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lee_Felsenstein#Life</a>
andagainagainabout 4 years ago
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