Computers and Creativity | Hacker News Reader

Computers and Creativity

mollymielke.com

71 pointsdayve24 comments

> In part for these reasons, DAWs are widely loved by their users and serve as a shining example of software making very little assumptions about the user’s creative workflows. Instead, DAWs accommodate numerous paths to reach a desired outcome, in addition to providing the resources and community to teach the user how to create any missing feature themself.

This is amazingly wrong. DAWs are notorious for imposing a specific workflow, and users will select a DAW specifically for some new workflow it has produced. For example, Ableton rose to prominence largely due to its unusual alternative workflow option (the grid) which made it popular on the DJ scene. Other DAWs have workflows and tools which make them popular with composers (Cubase for example) or tinkerers (Bitwig, Reason, etc.).

That is correct in my own experience. I started composing music using DAWs and little did I know that was only one limited way, creatively speaking, of getting things done. Yes, using DAWs, one can tweak, modify, prefect mistakes, etc. But all that comes at a cost, the cost being the creative part is largely compromised, and I find that the abundance of options make DAW first time users think they've hit the jackpot when in fact, creatively speaking, less is more and their creative growth would be facilitated by simpler tools. When artists lack a certain skill technology can easily fill that void. Initially it seems like the best deal but the cost is large and the sooner they find that out the better they can get to doing real meaningful work. Technology in art in large proportion becomes an artifice that is very attractive but by itself isn't very meaningful.

Yep. In the terms I use, it's another instance of "the medium is the message", and if the medium is an edifice of mechanisms to configure the medium - well, you have trouble communicating a message. So in an actual workflow, most of the DAW will go unused at any moment, for the same kinds of reasons that most of Excel is unused most of the time. The process will traverse and pingpong various paths that loop outside of the software. The tools don't make the rules, but they suggest a path of least resistance.

It's an old problem within software itself and not really addressed until the individual puts their foot down and says, "This. This is the medium, these are the restrictions, this is the way I structure everything." At that point it's possible to define perfect software, but we're too fickle to really get there.

Having used Fruity Loops, Reason, Cubase and Ableton back in the day as a kid, I agree.

Reason + Cubase linked together was a lot of fun :)

>DAWs are notorious for imposing a specific workflow, and users will select a DAW specifically for some new workflow it has produced

That's spectacularly wrong. The core workflows (sequencing, editing audio, mixing, etc) are similar in every DAW because that's their inherent nature, nor because they're somehow imposed upon users.

The only major different paradigm was Live, which, as it name implies, offered a "live clip launching" way of interaction. But that's not about "imposing a strict workflow" it's about supporting a different use case or not. In other words, it's like there were editors for programming, and someone went and make an editor optimized for live coding. And even that, is offered in several DAWs, including BitWig, FL Studio, and even Logic.

The core workflow itself (which involves sequencing, editing audio, mixing, etc) has 100s of ways it can be mixed/matched/customize/performed differently within the same DAW.

This is plausibly written, but the author has piled buzzwords on commonplace platitudes, and hasn't bothered to familiarise themselves with the literature on Computational Creativity. (Namechecks: Margaret Boden, Anna Jordanous, Geraint Wiggins, and others.)

The Association for Computational Creativity is holding its 12th annual conference this year, and this reads as if the author has never heard of them.

I almost LOLd when I read that "no tool exemplifies moldability better than music digital audio workstations." DAWs are the antithesis of moldability. They force you to think of audio in the same way that a 70s/80s studio engineer thought of audio, but with time-saving virtualisation and automation. They're almost entirely closed to any context-aware semantic editing or creation.

So... superficially researched, and not an inspiring piece.

It looks like the final project from an industry-oriented masters program. So, yeah, it's not going to be real research, it's going to be whatever a time-strapped, semi-interested person can scrape together to jump through yet another career hoop.

I thought that surely some mention of end user programming would have been warranted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_development

This is full of nonsense. For example:

> However, a new way of thinking about these machines began to emerge in the late 1980s. From the punch card came the spreadsheet

Spreadsheets were in no way derived from punch cards (except in the sense that everything was), and the first widely used spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was developed and released in the late 1970s.

So, I was doing well with this until I hit this line, which literally stopped me in my tracks and caused me to reread it and the context several times to see if I missed something:

> Collaborative software as we know it was born soon after in the form of Google Sheets, the first simultaneous multiplayer software.

What?

Ok, first addressing the common complaints:

- Yeah, DAWs suck, poor example, let's ignore this.

- The title is probably not very well chosen, as some other commenters highlighted by focusing a lot on creativity on itself. The actual piece seems to try to focus more on making computers better platforms for the practice of creativity, not so much about the creative limits of computers on themselves.

- This is a technical crowd, and the piece is more about "what would be nice", so no point bothering that much on technical issues.

I actually agree with the main point, but indeed, just saying "what would be nice" is not that helpful. For the point on standarization, I think a better, more technical and actionable framing, would be to try to port the concept of type safety from languages to specs and APIs. While there's some kind of informal consensus on the main types that are used everywhere, if we could (yeah, this is a massive leap, but I'm only trying to illustrate the idea) pass "specs" into functions in type-safe languages, just like we can pass complex functions as parameters in many modern languages, and we could automatize to some degree compliance and testing, that would be awesome. So, not so much about standarization, but about a new abstraction level, making the interoperability of computational systems type safe. I think about something as common as urls, and I tell to myself: this is such an unsafe mess. Even if a spec is technically well defined, translating that into code is too much.

The other general point, moldability, might be better expressed as "accessibility". Making systems more accessible to users. But I think besides many poor software tools made in a rush for specific interests, we are already doing decently here when we really try. It's only that big companies that make the big products usually have too much inertia to continue doing certain things the same way they have been done in the last 40 years (most DAWs are a good example as many commenters pointed out), and smaller actors don't have enough resources to make complex tools that are much cooler than what we have. But on this aspect, I don't think the obstacles are that significant.

Oh, and on a final note, nice writing (even if it wanders a bit too much sometimes) and really beautiful design. Even the html is pretty readable.

I am a professional artist and I just wanna note that the idea of users being able to customize the fuck out of their tools is all well and good, but realistically:

It takes multiple years of focused effort to get good at the other skills involved in using a tool.

And it takes no small amount of investment of time and energy to get to the point where you have the programming skills to modify the tool.

Plus of course the inner calculations of "will trying to modify this thing be likely to find any success before I have spent more time trying to hack it than I will ever save by doing this" need to at least look like they will come up favorably.

I mean, someone in the community is probably gonna have that combination, this past month I've been looking at picking up Adobe Animate for the first time in like 15 years to do some animation, and I went looking for plugins for it and found a few paid plugins made by a dude who started working in the animation scene around the same time I did, and never left it; this man has clearly found a lot of pain points in the process of cranking out the footage in Flash/Animate and built plugins to fix those holes long before Adobe could be bothered (and it sounds like there are a lot of unlicensed copies of his plugins floating around studios, too), and if I find this one animation gig I'm being coaxed out of retirement to be enough fun that I wanna take a few more, you can bet your ass that I'm gonna give this dude like sixty bucks for his well-polished patches in Adobe's UI rather than spending the time getting up to speed on making Animate plugins.

And this is coming from someone who hangs out on HN and has a tidy little collection of homebrew scripts for Illustrator, the art tool she spends most of her creative time in.

I'm curious what kind of plugins you're talking about? I'm working on 2D animation tools for my game engine and wondering what kind of tech people are using nowadays.

The particular plugins I was referencing are the ones at https://www.wootiecartoons.com/search/label/TOOLs - which are as much about solving particular points of pain with "trying to get animation done in this one particular program" as they are about generally animating.

Flash was always kind of a big pile of shit, while at the same time being the least shitty thing available, and it seems to have maintained that status after fifteen years of development while I was off mastering Illustrator. It is the devil I halfway know, and am already paying for with my Adobe subscription, vs. the mystery of shelling out for Toon Boom and starting from scratch on it or trying to learn Blender's weird 2d workflow or something. You should look at animation tools that aren't Animate. :)

If I were writing on the history of this topic, I would start 80 years earlier with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace - Babbage saw his general-purpose computer as a mathematical equation solver, while Ada Lovelace (who was originally hired to translate his lecture [1]) envisioned the creative use cases that general-purpose computing would eventually have.

[1] https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...

> Ultimately, I will be arguing that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools need to be interoperable, moldable, efficient, and community-driven.

Huzzah!! Yesss! Sing it loud. There's other who believe similarly. The Malleable Systems Collective[1] for example! From their opening words:

> Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only function in preset ways determined by some far away team. Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten many times over rather than recomposed.

This idea/aspiration of ever-enrichening imminently-flexible ecosystems is mirrored in my reply to the recent The Dispassionate Developer[2], where I argue my hopes that systems be more open ended & allow more people access & participation.

[1] https://malleable.systems/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26551529

Does anyone have suggestions for this post? I write optimistic hopeful pieces like this a lot, that espouse positive virtues, and so often they end up downvoted, sometimes heavily. It feels like such an alien hostile force is out there, dark negative forces silently bringing only downvotes out from the dark forest. A silent world that doesn't have any positive values, that rejects cooperation & positivity. How can I make these words less disagreeable? Or are my grim assessment perhaps too real?

It just feels so cheap, that negativity is so free, that snark is just seems overflowing in most comments, and that's what seems to attract support. Like the case here, I want to see a more open, unlimited mentality. Instead it just feels like everyone's looking for fuel to burn.

Honestly, after "Huzzah!! Yesss! Sing it loud." I simply stopped reading, as I expected a snarky and sarcastic comment to follow. It's an extremely non-neutral way to start a comment, and while that's not inherently bad, in a medium like this, where it's hard to tell the intentionality of a commenter, it forces people to figure out what are you trying to do here, and that's very draining. If we had to do this for every comment in a thread, many of us would simply skip the comments. I bet most people that downvoted you simply didn't completely read your comment and were annoyed by your tone, even if they misinterpreted it. I don't think it's wrong expressing yourself differently, but being in a minority makes you less fit for any medium that expects a certain zen.

If you started this with a more neutral "I loved this!", that would serve as a warning for "passionate, high energy comment incoming", and people would know to skip if they weren't looking for that. Simply, your signals are too confusing in this context.

Edit: wow, rereading this it sounds quite harsh, almost as if I was making a moral judgement here. Not my intention at all, I was just trying to add some perspective.

"If they didn't laugh, it wouldn't be the Tao."

https://www.egreenway.com/taoism/ttclz41.htm

AKA "Don't let the turkeys get you down."

Direct link to comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26568056

You guys could read "Tools for Conviviality"[1] by Ivan Illich (1973). He talks about how tools could be more limited and useful to the person rather than make a person slave of the tool (he repeats this idea a lot). It expands on a previous idea of Deschooling Society.

Those ideas inspired the making of the first personal computer btw[2]. [1]https://ia801707.us.archive.org/29/items/illich-conviviality... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein#Life

Deleted

The general understanding on HN is that it is poor form to criticize the style rather than the content of your post. This expectation is not difficult to meet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Good call, thank you

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