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Originally Posted by
disantlor
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some interesting and well-put points made above but it’s worth noting that making music is a more pure art form in the sense that you can totally abandon any historical context or technical information, and completely bumble your way into something interest, purely on the strength of your ideas.
in building equipment, you can’t escape the foundation of physics, at minimum, but music (and other forms of art, painting etc) existing in an imaginary mental space and create a totally personal history/context to work from.
obviously (as noted) one can enrich their ideas by exploring the past, but there are some cases where total ignorance pushes things forward. Of course people take that approach into realms where lives and livelihoods are at stake (not good!). But since they are not at stake in art making, it creates a funny situation where there is a positive to protecting ignorance.
This is an interesting subject, because if we could truly ignore everything that has gone before us in the past we could put this to the test? However, short of being cut off having lived a whole life in an isolated forest devoid of any people, everything we actually do in art has to be with some awareness of what has gone before?
However much we would like to think that what we are doing is truly unique, we cannot ignore, or totally erase the stuff we heard or experienced before. It is as always a progression.
Similarly with tech, we make stuff out of technology that exists, because other's have developed it before us - we have no choice. So I started with tubes, then it was transistors, then it was integrated circuits - and it finally ended up being digital. I used whatever was around to do what I considered as my 'artistic designs'.
Even at the points when I came up with some concoction that was actually 'new' (which is very difficult to do in practice), I was still reliant on the science which came before and the tech that existed at the time. I imagined stuff like the DSM process in the 1970s. But it only became possible when new digital technology allowed it - and I had the help of a friend with deep mathematical training, with whom we both busted our guts for a year to make it actually happen.
It's like the old adage; 'no man is an island'..?