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Originally Posted by mr dave
Here's my beef with that angle. Let's say you're realm is the visual arts. You've dedicated years of your life to learn to paint. Then some kid shows up, snaps a digital photo of a scene you've been working on, spends a few hours in Photoshop running filters over the image and then VOILA! their end result looks like a painting. Is that person an actual artist or just an image manipulator?
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Well that's not really a fair comparison. Making music on a computer isn't the same as pressing a button and getting a picture an artist would have to slave over to even come close. But in that same realm of visual arts, would you consider a person that can make extremely detailed and fantastic artwork by hand on Photoshop to be an artist, or just some lackey pressing a button? Does it matter that he's using a mouse, rather than a paintbrush? Sure, one method might have different sets of difficulties over the other, but both require an artist's mind and skill in order for the end result to be considered art...
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That's the thing that seems to be lacking for me. A lot of people arguing that angle seem to put musical instruments on the same level as the computer - it's just a tool the musician uses. Which, on one level is completely true and accurate. On another it's complete wrong. There is no other purpose for a piano, guitar, drums, etc to exist other than to make music. That's why they were invented. The computer, not so much.
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You're looking at it wrong. The computer isn't the instrument. The music software is, and is designed for specifically the purpose of making music, which nicely parallels the purpose of an actual music instrument. Also, you might say "well, you still NEED the computer so that the software can work", but that's pretty much the same as saying you need physics in order for a music instrument to work. The purpose of an instrument, whether digital or physical, relies on one thing or another for it to function, but is not defined by it.
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I guess that's really my main beef with computer / non computer musicians. If you've never actually learned a musical instrument I can't bring myself to call you an actual musician. The computer is NOT a musical instrument.
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Well, if you've read what I've typed above, I hope that you can at least entertain the slightest possibility that music creation software is, logically, an instrument in the intuitive sense of the word. Maybe even in a denotative sense. And if you have any idea of the actual skill that's involved with music creation on a computer, then you definitely know it can't be compared to arbitrarily taking a photo, and that some merit should be given to the musicianship of a person with the ability to create what people consider good music.
