At Game Girl Advance, Sandford parodies the ilife suite by “announcing” the release of “attic author” (thanks to matt jones for the link):

[…]Apple is proud to announce an add-on package to our popular iLife ’04 suite of applications — including the easiest to use music playback and purchasing software available, iTunes, and the new, exciting GarageBand music composition software. Today we bring you AtticAuthor.

No more struggling for the right word, the perfect turn of phrase, the most expedient and direct yet elegant metaphor. AtticAuthor takes care of all that for you. With over 1,000 ApplePhrases, and an additional 2,000 available in the optional PenPack, AtticAuthor will have you immediately writing short stories, plays and even novels. Never has creative writing been so easy. […]

It’s clear from the comments to his post that Sandford has succeeded in his aim to spark debate on the cultural implications of “consumer” level production tools like garageband, betraying a general anxiety over authority, authenticity and cultural value the like of which we haven’t seen since the advent of synthesisers and MIDI sequencers in the early 1980s. Since then, we’ve seen a proliferation of music creation software (from basic sequencers like Band in a Box and Fruity Loops to loop-based multitrack software like Acid, and full-fledged MIDI/audio studio recording software like Cubase), but none so easy to use with absolutely no prior knowledge as garageband – it comes with heaps of loops that you can drag and drop right out of the box.

Sandford asks:

In all seriousness, as skills and techniques that heretofore have taken months, years or even decades to perfect are readily available through software, will we refocus on and exalt the quality of the underlying content, or will society write off artistic endeavors as mere smoke, mirrors and Macintosh?

There is a focus on the evaluation of content here that I find frustrating, if predictable. Some of the commenters bemoan the impending flood of poor quality content. Now, that’s just silly. Let’s assume for a minute that aesthetic quality is what matters most here (I’m not at all sure that it is, of course). Let’s assume that thousands of people, not skilled enough to create “interesting work”, are going to churn out formulaic pseudo-techno music using the loops provided as part of the software package. OK. But how will their music be distributed so widely as to be a bother to the concerned, discerning, music lovers? No, there is something else going on.

Another worry, implied in Sanford’s question and also in several of the comments to his post, is that by “allowing” people to make their own music quickly and easily, “we” (that is, we, the guardians of the Great Mystery that is Art) will allow the mystique and aura of the creative process to be diluted, so that people might dare to think that anyone can create good music, and will therefore lose respect for “real artists”, and so there will be no market for “real art”, and civilization will collapse in a pile of cheesy guitar riffs. Well, let’s leave aside the obvious frantic gatekeeping going on here (I mean for god’s sake, are we going to ban public humming or whistling next?), and address the substantive concerns.

I have two hypotheses (note, not statements of fact, but possibilities) in relation to music specifically:

1. Going through the process of creating music makes you a more informed listener, and therefore a more discerning consumer, thereby encouraging interesting and innovative creative production all round.

For example, making a techno track yourself by the process of sequencing drums and layering channels opens your ears to the structure of other people’s music. When I was a music student, I found that after learning how to make orchestral arrangements, when I listened to an orchestral recording I could suddenly hear and identify each individual instrument, whereas before I’d only heard a big mush of melodic sound (OK, a slight exaggeration, but I did experience a kind of aural epiphany that I clearly remember to this day). Besides, if it is so easy to make formulaic techno or pop music, and so hard to make “real” music, then won’t that disrupt the marketing power of the global pop industry, and make people value the “true artists” even more??

2. People who make music are more interested in music and enjoy listening to it more than people who are not musicians at all.
The audience research for my last project suggested that the classically trained musicians in the audience watch and listen a classical concert with what Simon Frith terms an “intense, physically felt empathy” that is less available to “lay” audiences, not because they are less sensitive, less “musical”, but simply because they don’t have that endlessly, endlessly, repeated experience of simultaneously hearing, feeling, and speaking music through the interface between body and instrument that musicians do. [And again I’m thinking here of my own experience of spending 4-6 hours every day in a state of intense intimacy with my instrument, obsessing over every minute variation in sound, even though the neighbours heard nothing but scales, scales, and more scales.] OK, so playing around with drum loops on your iMac is not quite as physically intense, but it shifts the sense of the musical self definitively, if temporarily, from passivity to activity.

The debates that spring from these aesthetic panics are interesting, but as regular visitors will know, I’m more interested in the extent to which consumer production tools both enable (through ease of use) and constrain (through the same ease of use) the creativity and cultural agency of their users. And the users, by the way, are actively engaged in the debates over all these questions of cultural value, authenticity, and agency – have a look at the garage band discussion forums, for example.

Speaking of which, I’d love to hear from anyone just getting started making their own music using a computer – it doesn’t matter what software you are using. What are you doing with it? Has it changed the way you listen? made you more or less appreciative of “professional” artists? And most importantly, are you enjoying it?