The fact that computers have provided us with visual tools for musical edit-
ing is wonderful. It lets us look at larger chunks of our work at once. We can
see (not just hear) where our writing has come from and where it is going.
And it provides us with a level of control of even the smallest things beyond
the wildest aspirations of pencil and paper. But the ears on your head (and
inside your head) ought to be the final arbiters of quality when it comes to
music. A piece of music is no shorter or longer than the entire amount of time
it takes to listen to it. Its emotional effect is cumulative. You can’t really judge it
without listening to it from start to finish. Computers can sometimes trick us
into working on bits and pieces and forgetting about the flow of the entire
composition. Be careful!Saving and backing up .......................................................................
All who have worked extensively with computers have experienced the hollow
feeling in the pits of their stomachs that comes from the realization that much
valuable, hard work has been lost due to computer crashes, forgotten saves,
and the tendency to not back up often enough. A lot of good music has evap-
orated in these ways even as computers advance and our storage methods
and software applications advance. Remember floppy disks? Cassettes? It is
important to remember that the information stored on a computer drive, CD,
or DVD is not actually the thing that it represents. Those bits are not your
composition.Chapter 18: Composing Electronic Music 239
Andrew Broder, electronic music composer
I don’t know if I’m a great lover of new tech-
nologies. I mean, they’re there, and I’ll use what-
ever’s at my disposal that I happen to think
sounds good. There are some computer pro-
grams that are just like, well, learning quantum
physics. They’re mind-blowingly difficult to
learn. But so is learning how to really immerse
yourself in learning how to play the piano. It’s
just as complicated, and it’s just as much of its
own world, and requires the same kind of facil-
ities in a person, the same kind of dedication,
the same kind of curiosity. But there’s a danger
that your music can become too reliant on new
technology, and the music sometimes can feel
empty when it just becomes a matter of keeping
up with what the latest products are. That said,
though, it’s really cool to be able to make a
whole album on your home computer.
Everything was new technology at some point.
Reel-to-reel recording was new technology at
one point, same with the electric guitar and the
synthesizer. Those all came along, and people
went through those same kind of debates with
them as to whether or not it was kind of cheating
or somehow more artificial to use than an
acoustic instrument. So, as far as I’m concerned,
what matters is the end result.