What can electronic musicians learn from acoustic musicians?
I write this from both sides of a bridge: I am a practical musician, and I am a coder who has built music software. And I keep noticing the same thing from the coder’s side. Take a programmer building a “shaker” function — something that makes dense, repetitive rhythms. They think of it as “something dense.” But if you have ever actually held a shaker, you know it is light and noisy, and relatively quiet compared to a large drum, though its high frequencies cut well. You understand that playing a big drum takes a lot of energy: to hit it loud you need a big arm movement. That understanding comes from the physical world — low and loud things take more time to hit than the shaking of a small rattle. A programmer without it might just take the “shaker function,” assign it a big-drum sound, and call it experimentation. Their space of possibilities is not filtered by what they know about the music. They don’t consider that a pick-up note is really a re-trigger, and so has a different dynamic than a single, isolated note. An acoustic musician, by contrast, projects their embodied cognition onto the electronic instrument — knowledge about gesture, gravity, tuning, being in sync with others, being part of the ensemble.
This is the pattern. Most music software made by tech people is quite cerebral — it focuses on abstractions rather than on particularities. The electronic-music lineage doesn’t have much experience with the gestural dimension of music; the focus is on texture, on the spectrum, on form. As a musician I understand that as an aesthetic. But music, dance and performance are things I have experience with — especially in the participative, collective dimension: circle dances, choral singing, percussion bands — and I feel that the seated body produces music that is very different from the dancing body. We take our embodied experiences to music-making.
And underneath the models there is something no model reaches. The “why” cannot really be explained in words, or quantified. It is the joy of rhythmic tension and resolution interplaying with the internal senses of your own body — Shakira’s “hips don’t lie” — and the inseparability of music and dance and theatre.
So the question that interests me is whether we can pass this embodied knowledge on through technology. Here is one concrete example. From my teaching experience, it is absolutely impossible to develop a sense of internal timekeeping just by staring at a screen. This is a reference we carry in our bodies. My years of teaching singing and musicianship tell me it is extremely individual — some of us were allowed to “bounce around” as children, some of us were told to be quiet. But the gist is that internal timekeeping only develops with motion; it can’t be shown to someone. Someone has to do something. So if you had an app that actually shows you your weight transfer — from one foot into another — especially combined with some good music, it has the potential to bring your attention back to your own body: to develop a skill you then take with you when you switch off the app. That is a prerequisite for timekeeping, and other things — like clapping off the beat — can be taught on top of it.
Why does this matter? Because practical musicianship is currently either reserved to those who have it in their community or in their family, or to those who have access to thorough musical education, which can be pricey and exclusive. And institutionalised music education is often very specialist; it originates in a European educational philosophy which brings a certain reductionism — studying music separately from movement, from storytelling — a particular vision of embodiment, and a tradition of music-theoretical thinking that treats certain elements as foundational, an academic focus on harmony, for example. The beauty of making electronic music, by contrast, is ease of access: one can get creative quite easily. There is no one to say that you can’t run a busy roll on a big drum through an entire track. Art doesn’t have objective rules.
So it’s important to recognise that we are concerned with something more specific. What we are trying to do is get students out of the abstraction, and make tools that complement, rather than contradict, in-person education. The measure of such a tool is not how much it teaches you on the screen; it is how much you keep once you switch it off. The best of them make themselves unnecessary.
None of this is simple. Any app is mass-produced, and a one-to-many kind of transmission comes with its own inherent biases. We can’t do justice to what happens in an in-person music transmission. But I don’t think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What is already out there is either the embodied knowledge of experienced players — largely inaccessible, because private lessons are costly — or notated music and books, which require years of study. There are obvious limits to what technology can carry across: you can’t learn swing from sheet-music notation. But between the costly lesson and the years of books, there is room for tools that hand people back to their own bodies.
In the end, I think the coders should be the beginners: there is always room for musical growth for coders, and for technical growth for musicians. Maybe the biggest barrier is the shared preconception that music, like maths, is “innate talent” rather than a learnable ability. What electronic musicians can learn from acoustic musicians is exactly what the acoustic tradition holds in the body and has never quite been able to write down. And the interesting question is not how to replace that knowledge with a machine — it is how to build a machine that gives more people a way in.