Eric Chasalow writing in NewMusicBox:
My relationship to cars is a pretty good analogy to how I’ve worked with synthesizers: They look shiny, sexy, and inviting at first, but once I drive one a little, it becomes just a way to get from point A to point B—at least until something goes wrong.
The next step is knowing what to do with the synth and where to drive the car. I am not much of a synth nerd, but I am a big computer nerd. In my experiments nibbling around the edges of electroacoustic music (mostly with computers), this has been a serious distraction for me. I think of it as the “Hello World” trap. Yes, it’s nice that I can write a little script that won’t crash; but, the script wasn’t the goal. Music is the goal.
Do others face this issue? How do you work beyond the “hello world” stage in a new computer music project?