it’s possible to fall in love with technology. I’ve seen skilled and successful software engineers give up their laptops to become farmers, therapists, or real estate agents. They can use spreadsheets and software to manage their crops, but code it is no longer your main concern; they are more concerned with the disposition of their goats.
No one wants to talk about it in the morning stand-up, but everyone is thinking: How could anyone turn their back on the future? Especially when so many people are trying to find their way. But replacements are hired, memories fade, and new JavaScript frameworks are released. “Do you remember Jeff?” people say. “One of his goats gave birth to the instagram.”
The basic ethos of the technology is that once you’re in, you’re in for life: after launching your first app, you’ll never want to do anything more than build more apps or manage other people while they’re building apps. . Simply wanting a paycheck is suspect; passion is required. So every time I fall out of love with technology, as it has happened to me maybe five times, I keep my mouth shut. I am a professional software hobbyist and co-founder of a software startup. I browse GitHub for fun and read random code. So I can’t, I shouldn’t, tell people that one day last month I was having coffee before a meeting and I looked up from Slack and thought, “Man, coffee is hot and runny and people drink it. . I would like to make things that have flavors and temperatures.”
I must confess more: the drift began a few months ago. I no longer felt like parsing Wikidata or exploring dark corners of PostgreSQL or hacking into weather data sets like I used to. I especially didn’t want to learn about any AI stuff they’re releasing this Wednesday. My excitement acquired an inverse relationship to that of the industry.
So I started to fill the time by teaching myself to play the piano. (Okay, a synthetic piano.) I found a bunch of old practice books on Archive.org and loaded them into an e-reader. I played chords over and over again, and scales. one of the books Peters Eclectic Piano-Forte School Expanded, shows a 19th century lady on the cover. She has her hair tied back and is wearing an elegant dress. The image is goofy in typical Victorian style, but I kept thinking about this woman while she was practicing. She and her piano represented the only way her family could regularly hear music. She was the Sonos of her time. If she knows any audiophile, she knows how exhausting choosing her gear can be. But back then, a man married her stereo. The stakes were high.
The piano itself, or rather its keyboard, made me very angry. Who designed this madness? Seven white keys, five black, all arranged around a scale, forcing you to twist your fingers to play anything else. It’s a legacy interface, the Unix of music. Of course, as I learned more, I began to understand why things are the way they are.
Medieval keyboard development teams had to figure out how to arrange an infinite number of frequencies into convenient groupings. They were managing the scope, you see. They decided that 12 notes per octave worked best, particularly when the notes were tuned in ratios to the twelfth root of two (for obvious reasons). And they figured out an interface for those 12 notes so users could easily control the frequencies, regardless of their musical ability. Then the developers of the piano added control not only of tone, but also of volume and duration: tiny breathy quiet notes and sustained resonant chords, available to anyone with fingers. The whole idea of the piano is a ridiculous trick of physics, mathematics and engineering.
And what did humanity do with this machine? Do we use it for its intended purpose, to play church and chanty music mainly in C major? Of course not. We completely ignore the intention of the designers. Beethoven, Lizst, weird jazzy voices, John Cage putting stuff on the strings, Elton John in his sunglasses, engineers taking the old interface and mixing it on top of some oscillators and making synths. I fell in love with the piano not because I know how to play it, I’m intolerable, but because it represents hundreds of years of sheer human wickedness and disrespect for all that came before.
Every time the, our, my, industry gets excited, it starts talking about how we’re going to replace things with machines. crypto it was meant to replace banks. virtual reality could still replace reality. AI it’s supposed to replace, you know, potentially everything and everyone. Behind the marketing, however, is always the most banal damn concept of human nature. The industry is desperate for us to become rational, self-interested consumers with goals (Homo sapiens), rather than what we really are: a screeching panoply of annoying semi-sentient superchimpanzees (homo molestus). And yet, as annoying as we are, given a 12-note interface, no matter how hard it is to learn, we’ll be making ages of music.
Now I have a spreadsheet open where I’m trying to figure out the chords from first principles. I’ve been making little synths in my web browser, using the Tonal music theory library and the Tone.js synth library, both in JavaScript. I like the way math sounds. Here we go again.
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