Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, February 24, 2004
11:44 - Oh no, we've let the hoi polloi into the museum! http://www.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/archive.asp?nextform=viewcomic&id=843	(top)
Steven sends me this interesting take on GarageBand: This isn't a new sentiment. The concept of "MacDinking", I'm told, dates back to the very first days of the Mac, when people found they could create text documents full of different fonts and text styles if they wanted to, with pictures and fancy layouts and all kinds of stuff-- so they did. An English teacher could always tell which of his students had Macs, because they turned in papers in which every word was in a different font. They looked like ransom notes. Later, things like WYSIWYG HTML editors took Web design out of the hands of the arcane HTML-savvy programmers and handed it to people with no more expertise than they needed for Word. Much grousing, naturally, ensued. Whenever power is taken from the elect few and bequeathed to the world at large, those who previously had been the elect few are left holding an empty bag, and are instantly transformed into relics. They might stand and wave their arms and point out that the new easy-to-use tools confer all the power of creation without any of the restraint and style that they themselves had had to learn out of the necessity created by the austerity of their tools; With great power comes great responsibility! they'd shout, but most people would simply smile and pat them on the head and push them gently aside. There's content to create, m'lad; no time for your bitter moralizing. Go back to typing angle brackets, HTML-boy. I heard these same kinds of complaints about iMovie. Suddenly Dad could go out and videotape his son playing in the treehouse; he'd be standing under the tree, unable to see into it, but he'd keep filming anyway. Then he'd take it inside, hook it up, import all the video, and with a couple of clicks export the whole blinkin' hour of material that's guaranteed to be meaningful to nobody on the planet but himself. Then he'd send the resulting hundred-MB video to all his friends, who would have to watch it or his crestfallen face. Maybe if they were lucky he'd have added some lens-flare effects or cross-dissolve transitions or a soundtrack of The Cat's In the Cradle, but regardless, much nodding and smiling and praying for it to end was bound to follow. iMovie turned every backyard camcorder-operator into a wanna-be Kubrick, and there are only so many Kubricks in the world whose only reason for obscurity is a lack of iMovie. But at least in iMovie's case, the real world had the decency to create original content for the camera to pick up. Dad's creative input is limited primarily to deciding what bits to edit out, where to put crossfades, and what background music to dig up. This was comparatively pretty benign... compared, after all, to GarageBand. Now we've got what may be Apple's first genuinely creative consumer app. It's specifically designed to allow people with no musical talent to create their own original music. Oh, sure, people with oodles of talent will use it too, and they'll create great things. That guy that Steve pulled up on stage at MacWorld to demonstrate the soft guitar amps in GarageBand, if he chooses to sit down in his room and lay down a few ad-libbed tracks on top of unobtrusive acoustic loops, can release a brand-new album within a week. And sell it, too. But for those of us who lack the skills and the equipment to create our own musical themes and weave them into the composition, well... our only recourse seems to be the judicious application of the included Loops. Sure, there are a thousand or so of them, and the GarageBand Jam Pack gets you 2,000 more. But there are only a certain number of combinations of these loops that sound good together, and some of them are very distinctive-sounding indeed. If you find a piece on MacJukebox.net called "Hindi Techno", you can be pretty danged sure that "Exotic Sarod 01" will be involved, probably with a dance beat added behind it. (I say this without contempt, because I've already produced some even more heinous examples. No, I'm not going to be uploading them anywhere.) So, yeah. Like computer animation, GarageBand is a tool-- but it shouldn't be confused with actual creative vision. It can't provide that. It may come closer than anything else to simulating that vision, and it may well end up awakening a latent musical ability in millions of Mac users who heretofore had never thought of exploring it. But yes, the MacDinking danger is always there, lurking, ready to pounce. And the people whose careers have been built upon a mystical knowledge of the subtle interactions of various models of keyboards and synthesizers and amps, and who have mastered software like Logic and have access to giga-libraries of sampled synth instruments and rely on their connections in the industry to get their productions published and heard, are bound to be horrified by the flood of fully realized songs that now represent no more effort than a few near-random clicks and drags on the part of a curious user just screwing around. Somehow it's encouraging to see how some things never change.