Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
since it forces you to deviate from your beaten tracks. If the tool network is sparse,
due to lack of training or coarseness of the tool, it becomes more difficult to find
these intersections. You might try to fill in the tool network when you have found a
point you want to realise, by learning new tools, learn a tool better, or ask help from
someone else.
Also, the better you know your tools, the more they become integrated in your
conceptual thinking, and the tool networks may even overlap with the conceptual
networks to a certain degree, because your concept may be constructed from your
tools. This is especially evident in music, where abstract generative principles may
be the main conceptual ideas behind a work, and at the same time the tools to create
it.
8.3.8 New Tools and Tool Design
Especially in electronic music, there is a strong focus on the development of new
tools, such as new synthesis techniques, signal processing algorithms and new phys-
ical interfaces to control the music. Why is that? And why do we need to learn new
tools? A new tool might offer more precise manoeuvrability in certain regions of the
material space, or let us reach completely new, hitherto unknown regions. It might
take us faster to known regions, and hence push the limit of the possible, within
a given time frame or within our cognitive capacity, by extending it—the tool em-
bodies intelligent behaviour and thus enables new lines of thought. A new tool also
creates new structural relationships, which will unfailingly be exploited in new art-
works. If you can get from A to B in a new way during a compositional process, this
can be used to create internal references within a musical piece, for example, and
will eventually affect the cultural network through repertoire.
For example, tonal harmony as an organising principle dominated Western music
until the early 20th century, in gradually more complex forms. All compositions
were placed and composed along these networks in the space of possible music.
When this constraint was removed (by Schoenberg and others), it was impossible
to just start thinking freely. The minds of composers were literally wired along this
network of tonal harmony, in addition to others of style, form and expression. New
tools were needed, to provide pathways for composers' imagination and for the
creative process. Most influential was the twelve-tone idea (no chromatic note must
be repeated until all others have been heard) and serialism (the use of tone-rows
and their various permutations and transpositions). They provided a framework for
exploration of the unknown space outside the traditional tonal network. After some
time, composers became more accustomed to these new modes of expression, and
the tools became incorporated into cognitive and conceptual networks, with less
explicit focus on the actual generative principles, and more on the sounding results.
Some composers were able to compose aurally in the style of twelve-tone music, as
described by Valkare (
1997
). If some other principles had been presented instead of
twelve-tone serialism, the results would have been very different, in terms of both
the music and the imagination of the composers. So, the development of tools is an
