> If a musician plucks the iPad violin strings to make an A note, it will sound the same across all iPads, across all artists, every time without fail.
Will it really, though? Touchscreens are pretty high resolution these days in both time and space.
I think this is ultimately a quantitative (and a huge one, at that, don't get me wrong) difference in the ergonomics of input methods, rather than a qualitative difference in "humanness".
Again, don't get me wrong, I am not arguing here that an iPad will produce "better" musical outcomes than an "analog violin", but I'd like to challenge the idea that the analog or digital (or maybe mass-produced vs. artisanally crafted) nature of an inanimate object is what makes or breaks the "human element" of a work of art.
Humans add the human element, by using their tools creatively.
I agree with you on that, it's a different input method and (therefore) will always come with it's quirks whether it's analog or digital. Digital art, music, animation, etc are incredible feats in their own right.
From knowing and being close with a lot of artists, the main complaint I hear about this ad is that it comes across as a destruction of the analog form to "make way" for the digital. Both of them can exist as they cater to different forms of artistic expression. This doesn't inherently make one better than the other. It comes across as a very bad take to artists that digital art is better than analog art, and analog art is on it's way to being destroyed.
I get it that this may just all be artists and myself reading too much into this. But that's art! We read into things waaayyyy too much sometimes.
I must really be watching another ad than anybody else!
As I see it, all of these great analog (and digital, there's a Space Invaders arcade cabinet!) tools are getting physically squished into the iPad.
That's coincidentally how I think about my smartphone already: It's not necessarily better than most of my other devices (digital and analog) it's replaced, but it's all of them at once, and that is quite the achievement.
That doesn't mean that the squishing didn't cause an unfortunate loss in expressiveness or ergonomics in many cases, but at least in photography, there's the old saying that the best camera is the one you always have with you.
Will it really, though? Touchscreens are pretty high resolution these days in both time and space.
I think this is ultimately a quantitative (and a huge one, at that, don't get me wrong) difference in the ergonomics of input methods, rather than a qualitative difference in "humanness".
Again, don't get me wrong, I am not arguing here that an iPad will produce "better" musical outcomes than an "analog violin", but I'd like to challenge the idea that the analog or digital (or maybe mass-produced vs. artisanally crafted) nature of an inanimate object is what makes or breaks the "human element" of a work of art.
Humans add the human element, by using their tools creatively.