Vision: the future of music technology…
I read with great interest Bret Victor’s rant on the future of interaction design. The starting point for his post is Microsoft’s ‘Productivity Future Vision’, which is intended to be utopian, but actually gives a dystopian and de-humanising portrayal of future interaction.
Bret’s response to the video is inspiring, particularly his definition of tools:
A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities.
Furthermore:
A tool converts what we can do into what we want to do.
Reading this has left me thinking about how I can apply this concept in my own field of music technology research. Traditional musical instruments do the job beautifully: they amplify human gestures, ideas and emotions. Projects I’ve been working on recently have the aim of bringing together music and digital technology, but I feel we are still a long way from creating truly musically-meaningful tools.
I’m not really sure how we’ll get there, but my vision is that we should create digital tools that enable musicians to harness the transformative power of technology through already-learned expressive semantics. Current tools work the other way, and force musicians to understand the semantics of specific technology.
What’s your vision for the future?
*Hammer Images used by kind permission of Bret Victor
