...anyway out of pure technical curiosity and feedback, and out of easy jokes about the clichè and creativity delegation, I have a serious comment:
- as you all stated art is art, and tools are tools. Without talent there is no tool that can transform you in a genius and if you are a genius, there is no need of special tools to show it. This is the bitter and obvious reality. But...
- as educated composers with technical know-how, we still have to remember that music is made of layers and ingredients, components that target different levels of consciousness, different levels of education and different mixes of rational and emotional stimulations: the pyramid is based on rhythm, then timbral colours, then melody, then harmony and finally counterpoint... so with fine counterpoint you will catch just a few educated or hyper-sensible people, while with good rhythm and emotional sound you will get all...
This is the key to understand the actual industry and the success or failure of different approaches:
- industry is based on success (because success is money...) and even if success is a mass/social average factor, manipulated by the media and a recursive education vs. brainwash process, still success is based on customers satisfaction. So why so often people love crap? That's the question we always ask... and it's misleading.
- because the concept of "crap" itself is subjective and context dependent: here the theory of music and perception enters the game and explains why fake orchestras and AI clichè can be succesful vs. original mastercraft and innovation.
- low education makes the musical perception more basic. People will stop to sound and rhythm, and will be moved by the loudness, the spectral richness, the punchy basses, the martial patterns and exciting ancestral stimulation. They will perceive pleasure and satisfaction, despite the lack of original or sophisticated melodies, and total absence of any counterpoint etc.
- is your audience educated? would your audience listen to Bach's fugues or the maximum they can afford is a popular tune of Mozart? Are they more exposed to rap and disco, or to chamber contemporary music?
Then the paradox is we composers still have to write for an audience. If we don't, we are just selfish idealists, perhaps we will be discovered and appreciated in the future, but it's unlikely... perhaps not impossible, but really unlikely,
If the average and rewarding audience today asks for basic emotions made of timbral hype and rhythmic excitement, "the art" is finding moving and exciting combinations of colours and patterns, whatever the source, in the comfort zone of clichè common language everybody understand... and this is not trivial. It's an art itself.
Perhaps closer to pop-industry than academic composing, but still about music, about audience, and about talent.