February 22, 2004
garageband
I bought iLife 04 the other day and started experimenting with Garageband. It is a fascinating app. I have zero musical education and still, sitting in front of it, fiddling around with loops made me feel that maybe I can come up with something halfway decent.
But really, what is the probability that I will hit it big ? Come up with the next great sound ?
Honestly I think Apple is secretly using us musical amateurs for a great scientific experiment: the musical version of the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator.
Maybe GarageBand should be renamed to MobyMonkey.
On the other hand, there are differences. The monkeys only get a typewriter. This does restrict their output to valid characters and prevents random scribblings on paper. But it doesn't even constrain the monkey output to valid English words. Would the probability of Shakespearian text emerging increase with such a constraint ?
GarageBand is actually very clever. It has intelligence built into it that lets it sync up loops that I almost randomly throw at it and makes them work together (of course within limits, nothing it can do about "Rural Banjo" and "Emotional Piano 01" thrown together). It has constraints and smarts that maybe increase the probability for that chart-topping sound.
Sorry, gotta go. More fiddling and further investigations are needed. Monkey business. That nice gentleman in the white lab coat with an Apple logo on it is feeding me another banana.
Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at February 22, 2004 11:38 PM