Information Technology Reference
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to engage with more advanced musical activities. A survey by UK charity Youth
Music found that 19% of young people playing music games such as
Guitar Hero
were subsequently encouraged to start playing a musical instrument.
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Driven by this enlarged audience, new instruments are emerging which have
some characteristics of these novice-friendly devices but with the scope to be used
in more advanced, freeform contexts. The
Tenori-On
, a physical musical device
designed by media artist Toshio Iwai, is a tactile sequencer with generative capa-
bilities. Alongside attracting praise from untrained players, acting as an entry-level
introduction to sequencing notions, the Tenori-On was used by innovative pop mu-
sician Björk on a recent tour. It can also be used to control user-created samples
and external MIDI devices, eliminating another hidden limitation of many sound
toys. With the inclusion of generative music capabilities in such devices, potential
players are now presented with instruments which may reshape the gap between the
beginner and the virtuoso musician, and enable many more of us to embrace creative
partnerships.
7.4.2 Final Reflections
We could imagine quite different ways to group together and order these ideas.
This format, however, has been brought about by our collective experiences within
the field, based on the ideas, theories and questions which frequently emerge from
applied use of computer-aided composition methods. It may well be that, as the field
continues into maturity, further experiments will lead us to produce radically new
sorts of questions and systemic categories.
Perhaps the single unifying factor which ties together each of these perspectives
is that they all encourage us, in different ways, to reflect upon the entirety of cre-
ativity itself. To build generative software that operates appropriately in a creative
ecosystem, we must secure some understanding of how we interact with our exist-
ing partners and tools, and how they interact with us. Likewise, designing new in-
timate interfaces to creativity means we must more fully understand what it means
to develop a close relationship with an instrument, and the conditions necessary for
virtuosity and value to arise from this.
Some understanding of the veiled process of creative partnerships with technol-
ogy is necessary to drive the “productive entanglements” (Clark
2008
) that we are
here trying to foster. With luck, these entanglements should serve to reciprocally in-
form our understanding of creativity, creating another culture-scale feedback loop.
References
Ames, C. (1987). Automated composition in retrospect: 1956-1986.
Leonardo
,
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(2), 169-185.
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“Why
console-games
are
bigger
than
rock
'n'
roll”:
