Music As Engineering Mindset Antidote

A few months back, I picked up drum machine, a relatively cheap DrumBrute Impact from Arturia. I did so on a lark, because I had many friends continously go on about how much fun synthesizers are, and I figured, eh, why not. Over the last few months that has been a hobby I’ve drifted deeper into and have had a rather unexpected updside from: a reprieve and alleviation of what I’d call the engineer’s disease.

The Engineering Mindset Or Thought Disease

The core element of engineering can be summed up as ‘constrained problem-solving’. You have the problem to be solved, but that solution is placed under multiple constraints in many different ways. Usually at least cost, often also space and time. It’s not entirely about merely solving the problem in an effective way, but doing so in a way that breaks none of the (usually at least partially arbitrary) constraints you were given. A bridge that may not cost more than this much, take this long to build, must consist of these materials and be done by this date, and should also be the best bridge possible under those constraints.

The ‘disease’ bit comes from the detail that ‘constrained problem-solving’ describes an awful lot of every-day life. You do constrained problem-solving at basically any point in the day, in some form, buying groceries, planning to hang out with your friends, buying cinema tickets.

This view propagates from projects are very clearly ‘engineering’ (drafting plans for bridges and building software) to everywhere else in life. The finding of constraints and goals as main point of view becomes natural, a grocery run is analysed in terms of what you must buy and what you absolutely need, and then optimised for being cheap and being quick to do. Shelves are analysed for storage space and cost, ease of sourcing and relative consistency, ease of assembly and so on, purely functional characteristics are often put front and center.

What is often optimised out is the personal expression, the desire to do things differently just because it is pleasing to do so, either because you enjoy the process or the aesthetics or the end result being a certain way. In another word, what is often optimised and engineered out is art. When it is explicitly included as goal, it is often first to go, as it is the most subjective and the most variable in terms of costs. This is fine in a professional context, the average bridge does not need to win design awards and the average grocery-trip need not be a dance choreography. Again, the issue comes from scale: When everything you do is seen at least a bit as an engineering project, and is approached like an engineering project, then art is optimised out in everything you do, at least a little bit.

This is… dull. Or, at least, dulling. Art and self-expression are not things that people should disqualify themselves from, that tends to come at great cost in a way I can’t exactly qualify and point out.¹ All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and all that.

Music As Antidote To The Engineering Mindset

Music in its common form and impression has the same problem anything that mainly is done by specialised professionals has: it looks entirely unapproachable. You know how popular music sounds, but you probably do not have a single clue as to how to approach making anything like it. This, again, is a prompt for the engineering mindset, there’s a goal and some constraints. Not least because of this I decided to give it a try, and here’s where the surprising bit happens.

There is no success criteria for making music. Or, well, there is one, but it is that you, the person making it, like what you’re hearing.

Sure, you can tie it to external forms of success, but that comes down the line. With most crafts, you can check your work. Your woodworking join either fits, or it does not. Your cake either rises and looks like the recipe picture, or it does not. Your seam holds, or it does not.

With music, and other forms of artistic expression? All you have is whether you like it or not, as a check on whether to proceed down this lane.

Similarly, it is different from other forms of artistic pursuit that also have a similar lack of constraints, in that it is relatively difficult to directly ‘fail’ - in painting or drawing, it is fairly obvious if your artwork looks like the object you intended, or not. Music does not quite work that way. There can and will be a discrepancy between what you tried to make and what you made, but it’s less obvious and less destructive to the overall effect than in other artistic media. More often than not your failure to do what you intended will result in happy accidents that are still good, just not what you intended them to be.

The same lack of immediate, overt failure also makes it more amenable to external support. An concrete, ‘classical’ instrument has a hard requirement for skill to make something musical, but creating music is uniquely amenable to having technology help. If you have instrument-skill troubles, a DAW with MIDI sequencing still allows you to create music.² If you, for example, ‘merely’ have trouble with keeping rhythm, quantisation will help you and move things played too fast or too slow to the right place. Piano rolls and modern DAWs help you iterate and move things to the right place without being immediately roadblocked by your own skill, or encountering the “must be this good to have fun” wall.

It is also uniquely accessible for an artform: nearly everything is accomplishable inside of a modern, average laptop. While actual hardware synthesizers tend to be prohibitively expensive and space-consuming, on a purely results level, a laptop can fill in for nearly everything else. The ubiquity of piracy in the music software space also removes the other entry barriers: dedicated instruments and gear.³

In this vein, I would anyone that feels some kind of way about what I’d call engineer’s disease to give making music a shot as a sort of self-therapy hobby. It has a low barrier to entry, a limitless ceiling, and as long as you have fun with any part of the process, a wonderful creative outlet.

Postscript: Some Notes About Getting Started

Especially in the beginning, forget about songs and albums, and think much smaller: 20-30 second loops and chunks. They can be put together much quickly, allow you to explore and iterate faster.

And that, to me, is kind of the crux of it: If you don’t like what you’re hearing, do something different. Pick a track you like a lot, and try to draw some inspiration from it without copying it.

Some actual, concrete starting points: You’ll want a Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW. Nearly all the big ones have trials long enough to figure out if this is something you’ll want to put non-zero money into and buy a DAW, or non-zero effort to figure out how to pirate it.

The most common ones I’ve seen used as of late are Ableton Live, FL Studio and Bitwig Studio. Particularly if you have never done anything in this area before, I’d say that Ableton and Bitwig are more streamlined and have a more ‘obvious’ workflow. FL Studio is frequently described as a “toolbox” and you can make your own workflow with what it has, but it will not point you to adopt a happy path, as the other two do.

A lot of online content in this space is in video form, in part because it is genuinely well-suited to this domain. My favorite channel here is Benn Jordan, who’s also a treasure trove of inspiration.

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