Great concept. Making music is hard. Such experiments with visual manipulation of music can help make it easier.
You can make getting from A to B easier (and faster), by replacing walking with cycling. You make it even easier with a bus, and easier still with a car. In some circumstances, this is valuable and should be welcomed. But it's a mistake to think that moving from A to B in a car is actually the same experience as doing so on foot.
I'm suggesting that this might be true of making music also.
No, it isn't, because unlike with getting from point A to point B, the end result isn't always the same with music making.
Music, in that aspect, is more like writing code or visual arts. Printing and photography becoming widely available didn't make visual arts worse, they did the opposite, because instead of focusing on just technical proficiency, the art was forced to move in a more creative direction.
With programming, us not punching cards with code and not using assembly as the primary language didn't make things worse, it just allowed us to go on a higher level and create things that would be unthinkable without that.
Same with music making. Being able to record a virtual orchestra in your bedroom studio doesn't make music as art worse, it opens up way more room for things that weren't even possible before. Just by definition, when it becomes much easier and really accessible to record something in your bedroom, which previously only a few extremely rich people in the world with tons of experienced staff could do, it allows for art to evolve faster and move forward just by the sheer drive of all the people who now have access to contribute to it.
However, the path that Reich did actually follow underscores the senses in which making music is so often a social activity, and there is no doubt based on interviews with Reich that having/choosing to work with other human musicians changed the evolution of his music. Not everyone likes his music, and of those who do, some might have preferred the direction it might have gone had Reich been an Ableton Live user. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that music as a social activity is critical to almost all good-to-great music, and that contemporary technology frequently undermines that.
[0] perhaps paradoxically, I am the author of just such a piece of technology.
Agreed on it being a social activity, but disagreed on contemporary approaches undermining the social aspect of it. Sure, it gives you an option to be more asocial when it comes to making music, but it also gives you ability to be more social than ever before.
Ableton Live has a remote collaboration feature now, so you can work on music together with people who are thousands of miles away from you. Quite a bunch of software solutions are available that make jamming together and recording music with people separated from you (by distance) easy and fun. Something like Splice Studio[0] is a godsend for remote DAW sync and collaboration.
While it was before my time, I'm sure the development of synthesizers and sampling audio tracks were considered by some to be shortening the travel-time between A and B, but those became influential in modern music. Maybe this isn't the next big thing in music, but it could be, and I'm curious to see how far it can be taken.
I'm glad we have cars because sometimes I just want to get from A to B fast. (Maybe someone just wants to enjoy making some light music through a fake book or light up keys.)
Other times, I enjoy hiking half a day because you see a lot of interesting things along the way, and the experience itself is rewarding for other reasons. (Like, conquering a challenging etude works my brain in a certain way and is satisfying.)
Tons of people will opt to make music via the easier option. But many will still try the difficult path, because it is rewarding and your skills compound over time.
And sometimes, a person who first does it the easy way decides that he/she wants to do it the harder way. People like to learn!