Now I think I was wrong.
I have just seen the creative director of Cutting Edge hold a sonic branding session with three musicians in a studio + a client. What came out of the session was an organically created piece of work that everyone contributed to, has a vested interest in and has more soul than anything we have every come up with using the machines.
Having espoused a mechanised approach to music creation I am now firmly flip-flopping into the camp of those who believe the real magic happens when talented people get together in a room and play their instruments, use their ears to judge what they hear and develop iteratively.
I am sure there are some parallels to be drawn from the world of software development; SCRUM methodologies versus Waterfall and all that but I'll leave that for another day (and another book?)
For now, I just wanted to say that musicians are not the enemy of sonic branding - just the opposite. Time for the people to rise up against the machines!
Ah Daniel - that's where you've been going wrong for years, then ;-) Machines are not a replacement for talent but rather a mechanism for amplifying it. Machines are there to take away the 80% of work that is "codifiable" (i.e. can be written down or mapped out like a business process or an algorithm that transforms images or distorts music in some way in support of the artists vision) and to thus free people to spend their time on the 20% activity that is new, creative and high value (economically or culturally). I once wrote a post about the same subject here, even though the perspective is IT-centric (http://itblagger.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/soa-web-20-and-the-end-of-drudgery/).
ReplyDeleteThe reality is that machines can accelerate the work of musicians and other artists and take away a lot of tedious work trying to create sounds for inclusion or post-processing what has been recorded but the real 'soul' of the thing has to be created by people. Moreover you also hint at a broader trend that is important - people love art (in its broadest sense) not for its perfection but rather for its imperfection; people like to be able to see/hear what the artist has done as this creates a connection between the producer and the consumer. As our hygiene factor goods are increasingly mechanised and commoditised so I think we're going to - maybe already are - see people wanting more and more individually designed and crafted goods that give them more of such personal connections with the creators. This is like the 80/20 thing again - once the 80% of necessities are fulfilled by commoditised, affordable products (and we now live in a society with an abundance of such things at prices which are pretty much accessible to anyone) so people's basic needs are satisfied and they start to look for a more human pattern of consumption. Think of 'automated' processes providing the 'platform' on which we can launch ourselves into new and amplified forms of creativity, from enabling amateurs to create professional standard work through to enabling great artists to create entirely new forms of art work. In terms of the collaborative session you mention I would guess that this is taking the whole experience of consuming an individually created artifact to another level; not only does the customer get to feel the outputs, they get to put something of themselves into it as well, creating another level of meaning (and thus) desirability for the resulting artifact.