Tammy wanted to teach Timmy how to swim. Timmy didn’t want to. He had an inflatable ring. Timmy thought he didn’t need to learn to swim. One hot day, Timmy’s ring popped and he couldn’t go in the water. Tammy enjoyed the delicious cool water. Timmy sweltered, crying softly to himself under the deck.

– a terrible story no one wants to read

In this post I will attempt to convince you, dear friend, that whatever onerous task you are relying on someone else to do is worth learning to do yourself.

This post is designed for anyone who is

• creating art or music that intersects with technology
• creating or maintaining art or music infrastructure in which other people must create such as creative studios or labs
• needing something to replace a commercial product that is dangerous or insufficient for their (or their clients’) creative needs

Here’s the thesis and below are arguments: relying on others to solve critical problems or create critical supports for a piece or project is a fool’s wager. Here’s why.

• Relying on someone else typically requires compensation
• Relying on someone else makes you subject to their schedule
• Relying on someone else makes you subject to their results
• Relying on someone else ultimately means giving up control
• Losing control is bad

Any project created in this way is doomed to eventual obsolescence as any piece of unmaintained technology is.

Either you are your own mechanic and can maintain your car project yourself, or you will watch your creation age and die, helpless except to eventually open your wallet again in the hopes someone can figure out how the original thing was done and either fix or replace it.¹Now this might be said about any project involving technology, which is true to some degree. Software Archeology and the preservation of art involving media is a major concern. However, there are people who have maintained their own work, updating with new versions of software, etc, whose work lives on. This is also an argument for open standards and adoption of open source tools where possible.

Think of The Hard Way as an investment.

Ye Olde Model

The old model (as embodied at IRCAM and some other institutions) of electronic music is one where the creative, usually an older, established composer pairs with either a technologist or a younger, less established composer, wherein the latter provides them the technical insight and often the actual technical apparatus itself so that the composer may use it in (or as) their work. This model stands in stark contrast to those pioneers of the field like JC Risset, Iannis Xenakis, Curtis Roads, Laurie Spiegel, and others who took the time to learn the tools in order to create work themselves.

Now I can hear some of you groaning (shamefully, with no sense of irony) that these are simply different kinds of composers and people and that, after all, the nerds in the above list of pioneers are not composers in the traditional sense anyway — they are Computer Music Composers (bad enough) or worse, technologists with a creative bent. My response to this is simple: if you have no experience or facility with an artistic discipline (in this case, electronic music) and have no interest in taking it seriously enough to actually learn it, perhaps you should think twice before dipping your toes in waters whose depth you dare not plumb. Further, even disregarding the dubiousness of “trying your hand” at things you don’t respect enough to understand, those composers of the first camp are cheating themselves as well as their audience.

I have personally been part of new performances of “classic” works of electronic music where the technical apparatus of the original piece had to be recreated, oftentimes wholesale because the original technology could not be found or was not maintained. Fortunately, for those established composers there usually are hungry young grad students somewhere who will fix your outdated stuff – hell, they are usually their own students. Unfortunately, for most composers this would simply not happen or they would be required to pay someone to figure out how to bring the dinosaur to life again.

But perhaps your piece or project goals are not so lofty. What’s the big deal getting some help?

Some Help ≠ Do it For Me

Let’s say you simply want a humble web presence to share your work with the world. Certainly you don’t need to learn LAMP, buy the hardware, run a server, host the site yourself, learn HTML and CSS and (god help you….) Javascript?? No. No you don’t. But…

My website runs on WordPress. I did not design it (my fabulous wife did!) and it is hosted by Bluehost NameHero. That being said, I understand all the tech and can add and edit content, make simple changes at the structural level by adding modules, custom fields, using Beaver Builder (STOP LAUGHING), and can make changes to css/php configs if necessary. I also know enough HTML that I can pad a div if I must.

This means that when things go wrong I don’t have to wait for my (wonderful and beautiful) wife or Bluehost NameHero to figure it out for me. I can do it myself.

But this sort of middling, non-polarizing content isn’t why I’m writing this — back to extremes.

Oh god, Linux

Linux²Yes, it’s GNU/Linux and this is my disclaimer. I will use “Linux” throughout, but I mean GNU/Linux. Please don’t sick Stallman on me!. That’s right. You’ve read it a thousand times here and if you are a student of mine you KNOW what’s coming. Yes, there are easier ways to inflict pain on oneself, but rarely are they so beneficial to the individual as Linux is.

Linux may be right for you if you are:

1. Anyone who can’t afford a closed technosystem and its user-hostile practices.
2. Anyone who simply doesn’t want the above.
3. Anyone who needs to customize their computer or computer-attached project in ways not allowed (or made extremely difficult) by closed, proprietary OSes.
4. Anyone who wants or needs control of their own operating system for any reason.
5. Any number of additional reasons, see some here, here, and here.

Ultimately, Linux’s openness and configurability facilitates Swiss Army Knife-like usability that makes it suitable for everything from running a Raspberry Pi to water your plants or monitor your home while you are on vacation to crafting a niche multi-media creation environment that is clonable, portable, and free in every sense. Is it potentially hard to learn all of this? Yes, depending on how deep you want to go. But it’s worth investing the time because of the limitlessness of the possibilities. Which brings me to me last rant point.

SuperCollider

When I was in grad school and learning computer music fundamentals for the first time the computer music lingua franca was Csound with Pure Data the runner up. Neither satisfied the needs of my creative work at the time³Csound was not real time and the orchestra-score model seemed antiquated. Pure Data was too fiddly and resource intensive and didn’t allow real time generative procedures in any sane way. SuperCollider did, even in the infancy of version 3. So I made an investment, and that’s how I thought about it. I could take the easy way out and just work with PD because it was easier to grasp but severely limited in its real-time reconfiguration and generative possibilities, or I could invest time, learn SC3, whose learning curve was admittedly steep, understanding that the payoff was much greater. I believed then, and still do, I could do whatever I wanted to do with it. It took a long time for me to learn The SuperCollider Way, and much of that time was spent cursing and swearing. But from the top of the mountain everything looks reeeeeeeally nice.

In Closing…

I believe almost everything is worth learning to do yourself, especially if you think of learning as the goal. Treat it as an investment you cannot possible lose on. Over time you will get better at learning as you learn more new things. You will be exposed to new ways of thinking and experience paradigm-shifting realizations as you dive into deep waters whose depth you could not even appreciate before starting the work. You will be empowered.

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