Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

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Surely there are some— every artist has a different process. But I doubt there are many.

I'm less of an audio artist than a visual artist (which I do professionally to some extent) but I imagine the reasons are similar to why few people make visual art using scripts and imagemagick or some similar workflow.

Most creative output is birthed in a more freeform state of play, to some extent, rather than being reasoned about and assembled like code. Coding itself can be playful, but when your goal is expressing emotions and ideas in art, having to pipe that through a rigid, logical process is much less expressive than grabbing something, even a virtual something, and making some sort of gesture with it. So unless you're trying to express something algorithmic, code is a layer of abstraction that operates in a very different way with persnickety bounds that just aren't useful in most creative expression.

I've done generative design using action script in Photoshop and made some really cool algorithmic photo collages, but even as a long-time developer, the frequency with which I think "this could look cool if I set up a function to do it like this" is pretty rare.

I think all the arts eventually gain a calculated precision to them, just at different stages of the process. With music, structure arrives at the very beginning: rhythm and harmonic structure have some concrete rules to make them cohere. Likewise, visual arts usually require taking measurement from a reference to build up proportionate construction; if it's a cartoon this tends to be redefined into a composite of simple mathematical ratios of primitives, while a more realistic look develops from something more measured and scientific in nature(using a proportionate divider really is lab work).

Once you get past the preliminaries, play can begin...except, you can usually return to structure by adding another layer of it. Harmonization principles in music have layers of structure to them, and "expressive" pop harmony can often be seen as a very calculated thing of crafting maximal tension and release in a short period. Likewise, you can definitely go in the direction of technical visuals, either with detailed illustration or computer renderings. Often there's a desire to digitally emulate analog workflows without literally using those workflows, which results in some additional technical considerations around achieving that.

I think this is how all content creation software eventually grows into a spaceship panel UI - even if you have a specific thing in mind for each process layer and can reduce it to a preset or template, you have to configure the software to get there.

Interesting perspective. I also think of OpenSCAD vs a tool like Solidworke. The latter is far more popular

Even then I'd say the difference is less extreme. When I'm designing physical objects, my free-wheeling creative energies will largely be expended during the sketching phase, and when I'm in the CAD phase, that's more like coding— it's more about getting things to line up, be the proper dimension, etc. In music or visual art, what you're creating is the expressive end product, not a precisely crafted representation of the end product.

Then again, I'm not architect or mechanical engineer so maybe that's different for different folks.

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