An idea for a way to sculpt music
I am a musician. I play the piano. I don’t play as much anymore, because my wrists are not amenable to such abuse. (My technique sucks. I blame one of my teachers.) I also program computers. My wrists don’t complain as much about this. (If you spend more than a quarter of your programming time at the computer actually pressing keys or moving the mouse around, you’re doing something wrong.)
I think the root of my enjoyment, for both of these, is taking pleasure in creating complex, beautiful things. And yet, I’ve always enjoyed programming more. Why? Because while coding well takes coordination and practice, the end result is an object. And an object that can be improved, more and more, each time you work on it. Whereas with piano, the coordination and practice are an integral part of the end result. The result is a performance, and each performance has mistakes and problems. With every new performance, you get thousands of new chances to make mistakes. The only way to improve a performance is to practice it, over and over and over, until the number of mistakes goes down to something managable. (Even if you get all the notes right, you always make mistakes. Good pianists can intentionally produce around two dozen different loudness levels, and can tell the difference between a note hit at the right time, and a note hit a tenth of a second too soon or too late.) Code is perfectable, and permanent. A performance is not. Working on code, you’re always doing new things. You don’t repeat yourself more than necessary. Once you get something right, it’s right. Working on a performance, you’re slowly training an obstinate and inattentive nervous system to do something replicable.
