DIY Tunes Turn It Up
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70203-0.html?tw=wn_index_3
DIY Tunes Turn It Up
Commentary by Clive Thompson | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Feb, 13, 2006
Barely 10 minutes after I had opened Electroplankton, my apartment was
awash in ambient techno. I had coaxed the Sun-Animalcule to plink out a
steel-drum melody. I had used the BeatneS to unleash a growling, acidy
beat. And I'd spun the Lumiloops until each was ululating in perfect,
oscillating harmony.
As many people have noted, Electroplankton -- Nintendo's hot new DS
title -- is not really a game. It doesn't have any goals; all you do is
nudge virtual plankton around onscreen until they produce pleasing
tunes. Technically, Electroplankton is a toy -- yet it's modeled after
the music-editing software professional sound engineers use to produce
songs. And the results, in the right hands, can be remarkably similar.
Consider the "Rec-Rec" plankton: You sing a line or clap a beat into
each of four fish, and they mix it together into a song. That's
basically a four-track recorder, the same tool the Beatles used on many
of their albums.
Then there's the Volvoice plankton, which samples something you say or
sing, and skews the pitch upward into a chipmunky warble, or downward
into a growl. This is exactly like the pitch-shifting plug-ins in
popular music software like Acid or Abletone Live. BeatNes, another
plankton, is a retro-'80s sampler: It breaks classic NES tunes -- such
as the theme from Super Mario Bros -- into each component note, so you
can remix and scramble them into new melodies.
The upshot? When kids play this game, it's practically like receiving
basic training in sound engineering. Electroplankton is not alone. Other
music-game titles have blurred the line between play and music-creation.
Kellin Manning used the PlayStation game Music Maker to write the songs
for his band Boomkat's first album.
What's even more interesting is that this blurring goes in the other
direction too. Even as some games look more like music-engineering
tools, today's music-engineering software looks more like a game.
Pick up a copy of Acid, Apple's Garage Band, or Reason, and you'll see
what I mean. They're all gorgeously colorful affairs, with drag-and-drop
simplicity and lots of pretty buttons and toggles to flick. You're
encouraged to muck around with loops and instruments until something
unpredictable and cool happens. Their fundamental design pushes one
toward experimentation and happy accident -- precisely the way a good
game encourages you to explore and mess about.
In essence, today's music software has learned something important from
games: Creative tools work best when they inspire playful activity.
This injection of playfulness has some interesting repercussions for
culture, too -- because it takes formerly professional activities and
brings them to the masses. This is precisely what happened to word
processing. Back in the late '70s, word-processing software was so
complex and unruly -- and tied to such ugly, proprietary hardware --
that people needed to enroll in technical-college training classes just
to learn it.
Then the Macintosh introduced the WYSIWYG interface, and word processors
suddenly transformed into something much more playful. You could remix
your document -- cutting and pasting text, fiddling with fonts, and
watching your design grow in real time.
Typographic noodling became a playful activity; kids learned it just by
goofing around onscreen. The result is a generation of people today who
think nothing of designing their own posters, invitations and CD-cover art.
The same shift happened with websites. A once-difficult craft became
point-and-click playful when Blogger and Xanga launched. Now it's
happening to video, too -- a once-professional craft is becoming
something any teenager can do with his webcam and some free software.
Of course, this democratization is a good thing for fun. But is it
necessarily a good thing for art? When Garage Band first came out,
several friends of mine e-mailed me songs they'd written. These were
people who, as far as I know, had never played an instrument in their
lives. A few of the tunes were astonishingly good -- practically
club-worthy beats. The rest?
Eh.
Turns out there's a good reason the pros are pros, which is why if I'm
ever in front of a microphone, I want Kanye West or Daniel Lanois behind
the mixing board -- not my cubicle mate.
Yet it's also possible that we're destined to reach a tipping point with
these creativity tools. The early days of web design saw some
horrifically amateurish HTML experiments -- like blinking tags -- before
teenagers finally became fluent in pirated copies of Photoshop, and the
web cleaned up.
If that's true, then maybe toy-tools like Electroplankton are the best
first step forward.
One brilliant part of the game is that it is nearly impossible to
produce horrible music: Electroplankton is designed so that even your
errors come out sounding beautiful. That could prove limiting to artists
at the upper reaches of the talent range. But, in a world where more and
more amateurs will be hitting the keyboard, it's music to my ears.
(A tip of the hat to Carl Goodman of the American Museum of the Moving
Image, who originally introduced me to this line of thinking.)
---
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine,
and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazine. His blog is
www.collisiondetection.net.
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