The family accordion gene passed you by?

There are “tools/programs” that are analogous to instruments in music or the colors and brushes in painting, but underlying them is the world of numbers and the logic that converts the numbers to and from colors and sounds. Writing a program can be mechanical, or it can be an act of creation when you really have convinced a machine to do something unique.

The best programs do something useful in an obvious way. The “interface” between the person and the machine will make or break a program.

Beautifully put, Bryan; I may quote you (with attribution, of course; after all, I’m not Ms. Coulter) from time to time.

The amazing thing to me, as one who has a foot in both worlds, is how far we’ve come toward a mutual acceptance between art and technology. A friend who writes avant-garde liturgical music and performs new music of many sorts has become such a real-world expert on digital signal processing, and the hardware and software one uses, that I wouldn’t think of doing any such work without consulting him. I met him when we were both working toward degrees in music. Similarly, another friend of mine with a music degree knows at least two dozen specialty software packages for creating and working with digital images; her photography and Photoshop work are just the beginning of her expertise. And I believe you have a cousin renowned for her Bryce and Poser work. I’m not preaching some grand convergence of disciplines, but any artist (visual or performing) who wants to make a name for himself or herself had better “get digital” these days, and the available tools make it possible for the artistically inclined technology specialist to jump into the arts as never before. In that one sense, it’s a great time to be alive, in the arts or in technology.

Beyond my own response to art, I don’t criticize it because I lack the expertise and the fundamental understanding. It would be nice if others would extend the same courtesy to those of us in technology.

I apply the same theory to CD’s. I have no idea how a laser beam reading 0’s and 1’s can turn it into The Beatles, the Beach Boys, or Claude DeBussy. So I don’t worry about it. I just listen.

Bryan, your explanation is very clever, but as andante and I both know, it’s turtles, um, I mean, gerbils, all the way down. 🙂

Sort of makes you wonder what else Stevens bloviates upon and knows absolutely nothing about.