Tuesday, 12/13/2022

01:14 music is beautiful

Saw a Berklee Network Orchestra (an elective of the EPD [Electronic Music Projection] major) this morning. Most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. There is something perfect about a well-honed flow state - being able to watch someone execute on something live that they've planned out and thought about well ahead of time - and all of the members of this orchestra excelled at that. I'm completely enamored. Watching the last artist - Jessie Sun - was something else. In complete concentration and in complete control the whole time, he masterfully executed this cacaphony of music that began with Korean female-lead pop vocal chops, but quickly merged into an elaborate blend of medium-tempo harmonic music reminiscent of Porter Robinson's work - but far more elaborate. The immaculate visuals of blended faces created real motion between the projectors - an incredible use of the space - right to left, left to right, then in and out of a seam in the screen itself, changing direction and tempo under the control of a video-directing Ableton Live instance - while the music itself was all composed in a Tidal buffer!

I've never seen someone in such a flow state before - especially not when executing on a live performance. His movements were small, focused and precise - but you could see exactly what was going on in Jessie's head as the music and visuals transformed in the translucent VSCode buffer projected through the elaborate motion.

I want computing and coding to feel like that. I think it's possible, and I think it starts with the user interface and window manager. I think we can make computing beautiful again.