It is possible To fall in love with technology. I’ve seen skilled and successful software engineers give up their laptops to become farmers, healers, or landlords. They may use spreadsheets and software to manage their crops, but code is no longer their main concern; They are more concerned about the behavior of their goats.
Nobody wants to talk about it in the morning, but everyone is thinking: How can someone turn their back on the future? Especially when so many people are trying to find their way around. But replacements are employed, memories fade, and new JavaScript frameworks are released. “Remember Jeff?” people say. “One of his goats gave birth on Instagram.”
The basic ethos of technology is that once you’re in, you live for life – after you launch your first app, you’ll never want to do anything again, but you can create more apps, or manage other people as they create apps. Merely desiring a salary is questionable; Passion is required. And for this reason, whenever I fall in love with technology — as I have probably done five times — I keep my mouth shut. I am a professional software enthusiast and co-founder of a software startup. I browse GitHub for fun and read random code. So I can’t, and shouldn’t, tell people that one day last month I was having coffee before a meeting, and I looked up from Slack and thought, “Man, coffee is hot and runny, and people drink it. I like to do things that have flavors and temperatures.”
I have to admit more: my drift started a few months ago. I no longer feel like parsing Wikidata, exploring obscure corners of PostgreSQL, or hacking climate data like I used to. I didn’t particularly want to learn about anything AI they’d be releasing on Wednesday. My enthusiasm has taken an inverse relationship with the industry.
So I started filling in the time by teaching myself to play the piano. (Okay, an artificial piano.) I found a bunch of old practice books on Archive.org and loaded them into an e-reader. I played the chords in times and measures. one of the books, Peters’ Eclectic Piano-Forte School has been expanded, featuring a lady from the 19th century on the cover. Her hair is tied back and she is wearing a fancy dress. The picture is silly in a typical Victorian way, but I kept thinking of this woman while I was doing it. She and her piano were the only way her family could listen to music regularly. Sonos was in its time. If you know any audiophiles, you know how exhausting they can be choosing their gear. But at that time, a man married his stereo. The stakes were high.
The piano itself, or rather its keyboard, infuriated me. Who designed this folly? Seven white keys, five black keys, all arranged around a single scale, force you to move your fingers to play anything else. It’s an old interface, unix for music. Of course, as I learned more, I began to understand why things are the way they are.
Medieval keyboard development teams had to figure out how to organize an infinite number of frequencies into convenient groups. They were running the range, you see. They decided that 12 notes per octave worked best, particularly when the notes were tuned at ratios of the twelfth root of two (for obvious reasons). And they came up with an interface for these 12 notes so that users can easily control the frequencies, regardless of their musical ability. Then the piano developers added control over not only pitch but also volume and duration—quiet little staccato notes and sustained ringing chords, available to anyone with fingers. The whole idea of the piano is an absurd hack of physics, math, and geometry.
And what did humanity do with this machine? Have we used it for its designed purpose, to play church music, mostly in C major? of course not. We completely ignored the intention of the designers. Beethoven, Liszt, weird jazz sounds, John Cage sticking things to strings, Elton John in his sunglasses, engineers taking the old interface and jamming it over some oscillators and making synths. I fell in love with the piano not because I could play it – I can’t stand it – but because it represented hundreds of years of sheer human perversion and disrespect for all that came before.
Any time our industry gets excited, it starts talking about how we can replace things with machines. Cryptocurrency was supposed to replace banks. Virtual reality can still replace reality. Artificial intelligence is supposed to, you know, replace everything and everyone. But behind the marketing, you always find the most insignificant notions of human nature. The industry is in dire need of us becoming rational, self-interested consumers with goals (Homo sapiens), rather than what we actually are—a boisterous group of pesky semi-conscious super chimpanzees (Homo molestus). However, as annoying as we are, because of our 12-note interface, no matter how hard we learn, we’ll be making centuries of music.
Now I have a spreadsheet open where I’m trying to figure out chords from first principles. I’ve been making little synths in my web browser, using the tonal music theory library and the Tone.js library, both in JavaScript. I like how math looks. here we go again.