Interview with Me About Music Technology
Martin Yam Møller asks people more or less the same nine questions about music equipment for a running series of informative interviews on his website. These have included the musicians Sofie Birch, Emily Hopkins, Colleen, and Takeyuki Hakozaki, among many others. Møller asked me to participate back at the start of 2020, and I finally completed the Q&A this past week. To be very clear, I don’t remotely have the musical talent of the other people interviewed by Møller; as I mention in one of my answers, regarding my engagement with music-making: “using instruments has helped me understand more deeply the music I write about, and playing has informed the collaborations I do with musicians, as well as the occasions when I interview musicians and other people who work in sound.” That said, I really enjoyed chewing on his questions, things like which “knob/fader/switch” is my favorite, and what’s “the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without.” Below is the second half of the answer to one of the questions, just by way of example of how the interview plays out. His question in this case was: “What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?” I easily came up with several answers for the first half of the question. The other half was much more difficult to answer, and now having looked over the responses from other participants in the series, I recognize I’m not alone. It seems like an obvious reverse, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized not only that I couldn’t really come up with a specific answer, but that the question itself reveals something about the limits of what we talk about when we talk about software. Here’s what I wrote:.
[A] lot of my favorite software, such as the Borderlands app, isn’t purely software; these are tools that work because of the physical interface on which they run. An app like Borderlands already is hardware, in a manner of speaking, because it runs on an iPad. However, a distinction can be made between a piece of software-driven hardware that will work until the thing breaks, like a guitar pedal with firmware, versus a piece of software that is dependent on a separate operating system, such as iPadOS in the case of Borderlands, that may break the software when the OS updates and the old hardware on which it ran is sunsetted. Any number of iOS apps fall into the latter category.
In addition some software, like the Koala app, already have physical parallels in hardware: if I want Koala in standalone hardware form, I could just get an Roland SP-404 (I do want to try the MK II, which does a bunch of stuff the Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II doesn’t). I love Samplr, which also falls into the Borderlands category of being iPad-specific. I love SuperCollider, but it requires a computer keyboard and a screen — I wonder what “hardware SuperCollider” might even mean, right? In many ways, SuperCollider is as tied to a keyboard as Koala, Samplr, and Borderlands are tied to iPadOS. So, no, there isn’t really a piece of software that I wish was hardware.
Read all my responses at martinyammoller.com/9oddquestionsformusicgearjunkies.
