Sound Unbound Chapter 1

My only regret after reading the author's first chapter of sound unbound is that I read the first chapter of sound unbound. However, I can certainly understand why the author asserts that reality largely exists in our minds - based on the complete lack of unified thought in that text, the author must have a few people living in his head.

One take away I obtained from reading the text is a firm confirmation that I would have hated majoring in English. There seems to be some obsession in expressive writing with using unnecessarily complex diction, and trying as hard as one can to bury the message of the piece. Maybe thats how literary scholars weed out the wannabes? If you can read a text and draw a single valid conclusion then you must be a literary genius. I, however, have little appreciation for this pointless weaving of an SAT verbal section into a quilt of an essay. Although....maybe its the opposite of intelligence that results in this kind of writing. Reading this chapter felt a bit like listening to Sarah Palin - you're never quite sure what word will come next, nor what context she thinks shes in. I am finding especially with musicians that there is some innate need to forgo context. I mean, of course the author believes the world exists in our heads - he describes the world as if talking to himself...why provide context or connection or explanation, he already knows what hes talking about and thats all that matters.

Communication strategies aside (despite the fact the author makes a case for everything being information while epitomizing absolutely terrible transference of said information), I was not at all convinced that this concept of sampling is anything special. In fact, I couldn't even figure out if the author was claiming it was something new and revolutionary, or something as old as dirt. First we see architecture and music related to this idea of sampling - art forms we know are very old. Then we hear about this great impact of software and the internet and FTP servers (for whatever reason that particular technology was chosen...). What was the message here? I saw no cohesion to the argument.

Further, I believe I saw an assertion early on in the chapter that this idea of sampling resulted from an exhaustion of possibilities. For example, the author mentioned a painter who stopped painting because he felt that he was just filling in the spaces. Yes, a very nice choice to try and make that point about having exhausted originality and therefore needing to compose non-original pieces to achieve originality. There is probably no better choice than someone who's life revolves around taking a white rectangle, filling it, hanging it, and finally grabbing a new white rectangle. However, lets consider the theme of mashups in our technology driven culture. The purpose in software development has nothing to do with running out of things to create, it has to do with progress. We have reached a point where the man-hour investment to move forward is prohibitively expensive in the absence of a preexisting foundation. In fact, sampling is THE MECHANISM which ENABLES original software services that the layperson considers both engaging AND original. These products are far more than the sum of their parts and in this context the samples are nothing but gears in the machine - do we consider watches to be mashups because they are made of re-usable parts (or any other machine for that matter)? I certainly don't. Once the casing is added, if that casing is sufficient to hide the influence of the parts entirely, then what you have is original.

Look at it this way - what we call "original art/creation" looking back over history consists of artifacts built on the framework of nature. Why aren't those mashups? One would probably argue, because they required human inspiration to draw art from the chaos of nature! But our revolutionary web services don't? Of course they do - our web services are built from a specific selection of technologies which come from a chaotic sea of technologies. In fact, it probably requires even greater inspiration today because nature isn't expanding exponentially - but the technology selection is. Based on this single chapter I certainly do not accept the notion that building on a man-made framework somehow makes something a mashup while the earliest art pieces are original because they were built on a natural framework.

Finally, if the theme was that all of nature is a mashup, then I must wonder why the author needed to spend so much time grinding away at this point. Of course nature is a mashup - we've had a pretty good understanding of that fundamental fact for at least 100 years, and an intuitive understanding of that fact for a couple thousand years. There are atoms, and molecules, and cells, and organs, and organisms, and ecosystems, and worlds, and galaxies, and universes. There are fundamental combinations with finite or bounded possibilities like DNA, states of electrons, particle velocities, orbital patterns, etc, etc, etc. This is neither a new truth nor a new idea - the only people who are really just now arriving at this idea of universal connection and universal information are the despicable data miners working to turn all our information, habits, and interactions into a streamlined commercialism....and I'd rather they never realized it.

So maybe it would be good for the author to worry less about the universal implications of relativity and scope the claims more to the recent history of audio and video design - because I'm really not convinced these claims hold any water past that domain.