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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I see this pattern a lot I wonder if it's been named and discussed before.

I think creativity likes having small struggles and challenges.

It's not 100% applicable, but it's close enough to the subject that I have to bring up this awesome Brian Eno quote.

> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

partly and I think it shifts the question toward "are there limits to todays medium" ? will we see a ultrasonic punk ? or crypto metal with sha256 over harmonics ?

I think this (alleged) Orson Welles quote says it best: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

(Information on the quote's provenance, for those who might be interested: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/24/art-limit/)

The similar quote I've heard is, "Form is liberating." I feel like I heard this in the context of poetry in high school, but Google turns up a bunch of references to The Mythical Man Month.

yeah kinda

I guess the first cause of creativity is a 'what if' not an 'it surely will'

There's something to be said for limitations. I learned to drive linux on a old p100 laptop and floppy disk installs. It had very limited resources (you had to aggresively nice oggvorbis to play .ogg files without skipping). The hard drive was failing and I had to put it in the freezer from time to time to bring it to life.

Anyway working with those limitations was very educational.

Fast forward to today, I've been playing the baritone sax for 18 months. I got a cheap vintage instrument. I traded it in this week for a modern Yamaha, and it's so much easier to play, and the quality of my playing has gone up orders of magnitude. But then again the initial struggle with the sub-optimal equipment was very educational.

there's a sweet spot between limitation and DOA. My first bass was what I'd describe a shovel. I thought a good player should be able to groove on anything.. but I saw my error the day I tried something more balanced (even a simple squier vintage was enough to help progress)

Seems related to the paradox of choice. Creativity is shaped by and can be fueled by limitations. Part of the creative process today, since so many tools are freely or cheaply available, is choosing a set of limitations for yourself.

In a sense, every creative decision imposes a new limitation and narrows the space of what is possible. It’s almost like sculpting: the final product is a result of cutting away potentialities until what’s left is recognizable as what you wanted it to be.

choice and price, there was a lot of choice in the past too but you'd filter from cost and how much you wanted to try something

Totally agree with this. I make music on an iPad with zero external gear and I've come to embrace this limitation as a deliberate choice that make me think more creatively about how to achieve what I want. Even down to the DAW I use -NanoStudio 2 - it lack's some pretty essential features like AUFX automation, but it's so well thought out in terms of how you use it on a touch screen that I'd rather work to its limitations than use something like Cubasis which really gets in your way in terms of interaction design.

I just checked out that DAW and I’m curious as a newbie — why are skeuomorphic “dials” considered good UX? They seem like the worst idea ever and yet I see them all over the DAW/synth landscape.

What am I missing?

They are controlled like sliders (swipe up/down to adjust) and contain the same information, but are much more compact.

Aha! I was trying to position my finger over the dial and turn it. Thanks for clarifying.

Ha, I couldn't work out what _isn't_ a good UX about them until you posted this. It's worth noting a couple of extra things about them too, while taking up much less space than a slider they operate in the same way - this often means you can get a lot more range / precision than if you'd tried to fit it in a slider as your touch can slide way outside the bounds of the control itself. The other is that there's a convention in touch-interface audio apps that double tapping the dial will return it to its default state, whatever value that might be. This arguably could be done with a slider, but I've not come across that on any of the apps I use.

Huh, didn’t know about the double-tap, I’ll have to try that.

You’re right about range and precision too. With knobs, the interface creator can fine-tune the precision without it being surprising. A knob that changes oscillator waveforms can have large, comfortable slices between each waveform, while an envelope length can be more fine-grained.

One could build in coarse/fine adjustments based on swipe speed, but that seems a lot harder to get right. I’m still quite hopeful about what VR synths and controls can bring. Synthspace may be the thing that makes me get a VR headset, and if someone ever ports VCV Rack to VR I’ll be there in an instant.

https://www.patreon.com/synthspace

It’s a hidden interface mapping for sure—you have to know about it before it makes any sense. It might help if a “ghost slider” appeared when you first press on it, but that could also clutter things up.

As I said in a reply below, I think the touch interface on flat glass is a stepping stone to VR synths where the skeuomorphism is more natural: grab the knob and spin it, just like hardware!

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