Interesting discussions went down at the Sonic Boom event put on by Future Human. In the panel discussion at the end of the evening Matthew Herbert was talking about how presets in digital music software are the death of the imagination and that someone who uses them to make cookie cutter electronic music is simply participating in the consumerist paradigm of contemporary music. I sympathise but the idea of using music production software in a 'consumerist' way struck me as curious. As software becomes more sophisticated and user-friendly, as technical interfaces become more intuitive and much of the mechanics of music production is 'out-sourced' to the computer, the scope or need for imaginative human input narrows. Will it get to the point, or has it already got to the point, where one does not really produce music, but rather consumes music software.

"just playing FLStudio..."