CS + Music: Some Feedback and Suggestions

[jskripchuk]

First off, I want to say that this book is amazing. I've only been able to read over it quickly once, but it's something that I'll be reading and rereading as I prepare for a teaching position.

Particularly, I enjoyed the CS+Music section in your CS+Arts section, mainly because I'm a music nerd. However, for a book of this quality and topic of critical consciousness, I felt the section on CS+Music was lacking on the history of technology and music as a social phenomenon. Of course, this is a drop in the bucket compared to all the strong writing about greater themes of politics and oppressions, and is only a chapter within a chapter of this book. It makes sense that this wouldn't be a huge focus since you most likely have other more important things to work on. However, as a lowly PhD student and someone with vested in this small niche, I felt that I can (hopefully) provide some competent commentary.

I feel like mentioning some of the following could further cement your established themes of coming at CS from a critical and social perspective. (Of course, I could also completely missing your intention of the section, so feel free to ignore as well!)

Synthesizer Pioneers

Your jump from Moog to Duran Duran feels a bit large, and ignores the huge amount of female pioneers in the field, which I think could help reinforce your theme on critical consciousness and maybe tie back into how CS was seen as "women's work" back in the 50s and 60s. Sisters With Transistors gives a short list of many of the female pioneers. However, funnily enough this list is missing Wendy Carlos, one of Robert Moog's closest friends. Her feedback and technical assistance on the Moog prototypes essentially helped define the synthesizer as we know it today, and her 1968 album Switched-On Bach is argued to be the album that launched synthesizers from being seen as tools for avant-garde music to being common in the public sphere.

Live Coding, DAWs, Electronic Music in the 80s/90s

All of the music programming systems you mention (e.g. EarSketch, SonicPi, CodeBeats, and TunePad in the citations) are education focused environments funded by educational institutions. While this is great (and something I'm interested in as a researcher and have actually worked with before), I feel that all your other examples on CS+Art focus on the tools that artists use and develop themselves (and are dare I say "industry standard") - not tools that are made for an education purpose foremost. I feel like this could give the false impression that coding in music is an educational exercise to sneak CS into curricula and not something that musicians actually "do".

For example, languages such as Max/MSP, SuperCollider and Pure Data are "standard" environments for music and multimedia used by musicians (or engineers making tools for musicians). For text-based live-coding, the functional language Tidal Cycles, was developed not for an educational goal but for expressiveness as well.

In addition, before modern DAWs like Logic or Garageband, the "tracker" environment was essentially the de-facto software for diverse burgeoning electronic music scenes in the 1990s (e.g. Jungle, Detroit Techno, Rave, IDM, Chiptune/Video Game Music) and was an integral part of the Demoscene (which was just accepted as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage)!

In addition to this, an interesting historical tidbit (which I can't find a good place for but I feel like it could be interesting to mention) is that a lot of electronic instruments and synthesizers that helped create new genres were originally commercial flops. For example, the TB-303 was originally developed to simulate bass guitars for mainstream studio production, which it failed horribly at. It's only when these instruments reached second-hand stores years or decades later that musicians from lower income environments were able to play, experiment, and appropriate these tools in ways that their developers never intended, and invented new genres (in this case, House and Techno).

Jazz, Technology, Etc

Also, I feel like that your quote on live-coding "resurfacing and celebrating the improvisation at the heart of Black American Jazz in the early 20th century" glosses over the rich musical and technological innovations in the Jazz Fusion tradition from the 60s all the way to today. Artists like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and even the esoteric Sun Ra pushed musical boundaries using the technology of their time, and can ostensibly be seen as a through line from synthesizers being an academic curiosity to the synth heavy sounds of the 80s pop music.

Black music has an unfortunate history of being appropriated and repackaged for White audiences before falling out of the public sphere and being clamed "dead" (Jazz, Rock and Roll, Hip-Hop), and at worst I don't want someone reading your great book to seem like you're reinforcing that.

[amyjko]

Thank you for this excellent review! I think these will be great additions for that chapter. I'm definitely eager to integrate these suggestions into the chapter.

And if you're interested, I'm open to pull requests if you'd like authorship on this too. I consider the book open and evolving, and I'd much rather have an expert voice in this chapter than trying to channel one. Let me know if that sounds interesting!

[jskripchuk]

I would love to try and write up something for this section. I think the main thing I want to know before I make any sort pull request is that if you have some sort of style or tone guide anywhere that I could base my writing off of to make sure it fits with the rest of the book. Also, let me know if this conversation is best continued here or though a different channel (e.g. email, Slack, etc.).

[amyjko]

I don't have a tone or style guide unfortunately, so the book's current text (and the chapter's) is probably the best guide. But since it's a collaborative book, I'd likely go through any pull request to suggest tone and style revisions anyway. And here is the best place :)

[jskripchuk]

Just wanted to let you know I'm getting back to this - the past two months I was busy finishing a paper. I just started working on a draft, so expect a pull request in the next few weeks!

[amyjko]

That's great! No rush on my end.