Collaboration and tools in music

When mixing in the box, people use lots of VST plugins to process a single sound. These plugins are developed by different individuals, often by more than one person. Then, there are multiple sounds to consider. Inherently, this makes whatever you are doing in the digital music space highly collaborative (writing, mixing, mastering).

DAWs, on the other hand, act like the infrastructure around those VSTs. They help organize music creation but are not as impactful on the end result, at least compared to VSTs. DAWs still influence what you are doing, like any technical innovation such as the invention of the microphone or the TB-303. However, their impact on a piece of music is far less recognizable. You can’t tell if a particular piece of music was created in a specific DAW nowadays. You can only guess that a certain jungle track was most likely done in some kind of tracker, but you wouldn’t know which one. This holds as long as we accept that most of today’s music is created in DAWs. I don’t know what comes next; previously, we had tape recorders. Now, a tape recorder is less common and is more of a stylistic choice than a necessity, unlike back then when it was the only choice to record your music (rabbit hole I will not get into: obsolete technology becomes a stylistic choice, even through emulation).

DAWs integrate into your music as a tool.

VSTs have a more profound connection to your music because to create a VST instrument or effect, the audio developer has to make stylistic choices when creating the DSP algorithm (even distortion can be done in several ways). This in itself can already be called art. Art that integrates into your art is what makes it collaborative. Usually, this DSP art is seen by no one (no pun intended, meaning that this DSP art form presents itself mainly as a tool; this is rabbit hole number two that I will not go into) and gets recognition only in the form of hype when it’s new and hot.

VSTs integrate into your music as both a tool and an art form.

Just like in any art form, we can have opinions about certain pieces that they are not art. I have my own opinion about DSP: generic VSTs that appear every day (another saturator, oh…) that use some JUCE inbuilt DSP and just have a different skin are not art; they are tools. I don’t mean anything bad by it.

Here is another opinion. Chris from Airwindows is really transparent about his work and truly has a vision of how he wants to treat digital audio. You can take a look at his plugins (they are open-source and free). They are not visually appealing, but the underlying concepts are unique (like Discontinuity), and the plugins sound just great. This is certainly art.