Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts with Its Software | Hacker News Reader

Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts with Its Software

pitchfork.com

7 pointsRoccan6 comments

I hate how these stories are framed. „Decolonizing“? „Biased“? „Hegemony“?

Screw that! If you don't like „Western“ software, written by „Westerners“, go write your own! They made the effort to design and code that software, to scratch their own itch. There's nothing stopping you! Your imaginary antagonists even created the tools for you to do so. Are you going to start complaining that Open Source doesn't understand your culture because the ReadMe isn't in your native language?

I'm all for celebrating other tuning and composition systems, but stop griping that things aren't done your way. Do it yourself!

This is a somewhat strange comment for an article that is about someone who didn’t like the music software available to him and wrote his own, just as you described.

OK, yes, you're right. I'm just intensely irritated by the language of the article - and this, despite the tools being already available (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26339038)! Sentences like: „...a remnant of a colonial, supremacist paradigm. The music is colonized in some way“

To me, that's the wrong itch to scratch. Instead of creating composition tools that celebrate their own culture, and push music in new directions, they're trying to hit back against a perceived injustice.

I think some context that might be helpful here is that European music theory really has spread throughout the world through colonialism, and is reinforced as the default in many ways and by many institutions.

For example, at almost any university in the US, European music theory will be taught in the mainline music curriculum classes, whereas musical systems of indigenous Americans will be taught in specialized classes or sidelined to an “ethnomusicology” curriculum, if it is taught at all. It’s hard to separate this from the history of how America was colonized.

This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the world, helped both by “traditional” colonization as well as the economic colonization via the dominance of European and American products and cultural artifacts, including music and music software.

So, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the overwhelming conformity of music software to European musical patterns is a direct result of the age of European colonization that continues to have an impact both on music education as well as the software industry.

Is writing software that has, as its default, the musical system you're familiar with, really "colonization"?

Reaper (https://www.reaper.fm/) can handle microtuning: https://en.xen.wiki/w/DAWs

A basic internet search would have resolved their issues. But why let the facts get in the way of the story, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com