Replication and interpretation

In his manifesto Team Human (serialized on Medium), Douglas Rushkoff discusses, among many other things, musical notation.

Musical notation, he writes, is meant to let other people play an approximation of the written work, not to replicate it.

To hear what he means, listen to these four pros play the same Bach piece.

All four learned from replicated — mass printed — versions of the same written work, but each put his or her own touch on the piece.

Interpretations. Approximations.

Digital platforms, he writes, don’t interpret the written work. They replicate it. There’s actually software that puts human error into the perfect replications. When something’s too perfect, it seems fake to us.

Humans are good at pattern recognition. It’s why we know that a person we’ve never met before is a person, and a dog whose breed we’ve never seen before is a dog.

We’re also very good at figuring out when something’s not quite natural. The too-perfect beat of early drum machines, before they had error built in. Some facial augmentations. Wax fruit.

We’re not here to replicate other peoples’ work. We’re here to interpret, to put our own spin on things, to own what we do. To be perfectly imperfect. To be original.