I think we all rely on happy accidents. To pretend otherwise suggests that we possess such a degree of technical mastery over our setup and such focused clarity of intent…that we could unplug our monitors and headphones and still make music.
But this is not the way it works. We all rely on our ears as the final arbiter of musical decision making, because we are not completely sure what we are doing, nor are we sure what we want. This is true whether we’re a butt-ignorant beginner or highly skilled.
I personally have a negative reaction to the term “happy accidents”. For me, it is synonymous with “incompetence”. As we learn more about music and about music-making, maybe the terms “educated guesses” or “informed decision making” are more applicable.
While everyone has their preferences, seems unnecessary to assign moral failure to how I always see the language used in practice to identify someone’s pride in doing something they were previous unfamiliar with. The pride is in something they called into being, not in devotion to being forever ignorant about their tools and methods.
Validity based on predictable inputs and outputs and always knowing where you’re going?
“Guesses” could be as negatively laden in meaning, whereas these “accidents” may occur because of a fundamental intuition in knowing what you have even if you may not immediately know how you get the same way without retracing steps.
Why I long for them-
I get very wrapped up in knowing and the doing, the practice atrophies.
Happy accidents help me gain confidence in applied knowledge, they’re not a crutch but the excitement that cements the work.
Obviously, this ain’t to argue about your feelings about the phenomena, just offer my experiential with the concept and how I choose to broadly interpret, with no detriment to myself.
I sense that this is a rhetorical question, that you fundamentally reject the idea that music can be validated or invalidated. Which begs the question, where in my previous post do I say anything about validating or invalidating anyone’s music? I suppose that the use of the word “incompetent” could suggest that. When I was a brand new Digitone user, despite my incompetency using the thing, I still managed to make some cool sounding tracks. I felt great about those tracks, but it did not make my incompetency disappear (nor has incompetency disappeared from my understanding of the DN and FM synthesis). But, yeah, incompetent is a pretty insulting word. Sorry, everyone.
Back to your question: Predictable inputs and outputs and always knowing where we’re going…sounds to me like a recipe for formulaic music. And knowing exactly where we’re going implies that we’ve been there before. But, again, I assume that you understand as much.
Anyway, a lot of interesting ideas in your post that’re worthy of re-reading and contemplation. Best wishes!
On the other hand it can also be an objective description.
I’m incompetent at a lot of things, but that doesn’t diminish my effort, pride etc in the process, just that the result may not be what I’m necessarily aiming for.
Competency to me seems similar to the scientific method, controlled and repeatable inputs creating controlled and repeatable results.
But with music, the result - say a piece of music that moves people and they want to hear again - can have little to do with competency on the input side. It definitely helps though, I guess!
