“If you don’t give thought to design, users will not take to the technical tools you’ve created.”
T.B: Let’s play psychic and predict the future then. There are several possible scenarios. In the first one the industrial world would totally close upon itself because market leaders would crush anyone making the slightest attempt at innovating. This scenario would simply be a follow-up to the current situation. Indeed, outside the non-professional sphere, no one uses computer-aided musical devices except for the big tools used in large recording studios. In my opinion this is quite a shameful situation because these big companies are driven by studio-related functional requirements that prevent them from giving free rein to their creativity as far as design is concerned. Of course, inertia would be the worst-case scenario. The true challenge in this field of activity is to understand and properly handle the transition between analog and digital material. Studios are equipped with analog devices and therefore digital technology fails to find a slot within the composition process itself. In fine, users remain stuck to their mixing table, using hardware synthesizers. This is quicker and enables users to work collectively in the same room. I really doubt that in-studio music creation and mixing is going to change drastically in the near future because analog techniques have become so ingrained in this field that they have imposed their concepts upon many digital tools. Digital technologies keep gaining ground in studios, opening up new horizons for the profession, reconfiguring already existing methods, but it fails to bring about great shifts in the representational paradigms underlying musical tools.
However, I am more interested in amateur practices than in the professional world. My research activities are centered upon non-professional users who interact with all the devices in their home-studios, and upon the various possibilities they dispose of, be it composing / writing or reading / listening. In this field things are definitely going to move ahead. The amateur field is not closed upon itself nor rigidly corseted by age-old traditions and the domination of a handful of players (like Pro Tools, for instance), and therefore it should undergo significant evolutions. Furthermore because of overpriced material, alternative economic solutions such as open source software are gradually being implemented, making it easier for many revolutionary tools to become more widespread. Unlike the studio environment, this field has not yet reached stability, and we are just witnessing the prehistory of amateur-oriented computer music (“amateur” used here as in one who is fond of something – from the French word “aimer,” meaning “to love”– and not in the sense of incompetent). Radical changes are already underway. We must opt for open source, an ever-developing solution in musical computing whose dynamic, vibrant nature facilitates collaboration and offers more flexibility than proprietary software. Secondly, we must also ask ourselves how to recreate cross-disciplinary working structures in the midst of this utterly fragmented economic model. The real challenge on a theoretical level lies in sparking off collaborations between people from different intellectual backgrounds. These types of exchanges need to be part of a clear framework, which aims to promote collaboration between designers and sociologists, musicians and technicians. I am positive this type of interaction is the key to rewarding innovation.
CADI: How could design contribute to the prospective scenarios you have just described?
T.B: In my view design is the link between technique and use. Design is what spurs users to adopt new technical tools. Indeed manufacturers failing to give some thought to design-related issues will have a hard time making users adopt new technical tools. One question has been nagging me for quite a while: how could we introduce design-related research into such a decentralized, fragmented economic model, in which roles are not clearly defined. To me, the most inventive projects are always rooted in open source software, but as soon as we begin to perceive their innovation, numerous questions arise about the structures that enable us to further and promote the projects. We often try to think about how to involve a designer in our activities. Let us keep in mind that in our field of activity money tends to be quite scarce…
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