[Jewelry making - Article 00003] - Re: [Orchid] Thoughts on the future of my trade

[David L. Huffman]

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Hi Brent;

>     Many, many years ago, when I played drums, a musician friend of
>     mine showed me this new wonderful drum machine that he had
>     acquired. 

    You're getting close to what I feel is at the heart of the problem
    with CAD-CAM. My cousin heads the music department at a major
    university. She is a formidable trumpet player, the kind with that
    "hooked in" way of performing that makes you suspect that the music
    is coming from another source playing through her. She called the
    computer made music some of her students came up with "ear candy". I
    was trained as a classical violinist, and switched to electric guitar
    when I was old enough to rebel against the authorities in my life.
    Still, I mastered Segovia's diatonic scales and studied Django
    Reinhardt and Robert Johnson. Here's my point. A musician working
    with an instrument will learn all the techniques of perhaps hundreds
    of years of musical tradition. Then he or she will notice the
    "accidents" and explore and expand on them. Improvisation leads to
    new musical forms. Now, sample a limited number of examples of what
    the instrument can do, and plug them into a file, assign the port
    addresses and interrupts for the computer's synthesizer, and you can
    "compose" endlessly with that. You can even import the samples into a
    sample editor and tweak them to create new sounds. But the visceral
    part of the relationship between the musician and his or her
    instrument is not there. It's like learning to snow board in a
    computer simulation. You see the path and the obstacles, but you
    can't feel the difference between one kind of snow and another, and
    wind just becomes a number and an arrow, you don't feel your spine
    struggling for balance against it. 

    That said, I'm not implying that the computer and it's samples
    can't, in and of themselves, become a new kind of instrument. But
    that takes a certain individual. I suspect there'd be a difference
    between what Jimi Hendrix came up with had he started out with a
    computer than what Carlos did when he/she adapted Bach. Same goes for
    CAD-CAM in jewelry. If you've never manipulated metal, you're going
    to have a different sensibility about jewelry design. Now it's
    problematic if you just pick other people's pockets and create more
    of what you see around you. But that happens with conventional
    jewelry methods too. My recommendation is that before learning to CAD
    jewelry, you learn everything you can about the traditional
    techniques and the discipline of design, as it relates to those
    techniques. Then, you begin by resorting to CAD when it is the
    appropriate means to your end, when it will give you a better product
    than anything short of a fanatic technician can accomplish. Finally,
    take CAD to the level that it's a vocabulary unto itself, so that you
    are actually thinking within CAD, not trying to use CAD to do things
    that have always been done other ways but that you've never bothered
    to learn. I've seen only a couple examples of people working in this
    way. The rest is either "eye candy" (like the schlock coming out of
    the universities, of it's that generic crap that smacks of automotive
    and other product design. It's either obvious that the person is
    playing around in a CAD program, not learning to make anything
    specific, just "creating" cool shapes, or they've learned to
    accomplish the basic stuff that every hack making cell phones, can
    openers, and Tupperware tubs can do all day long. So, do you want to
    be a Hendrix, or is it too much fun being one of the many Carlos's? 

David L. Huffman


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