For this week's response, I'd like to write about a few ideas related to music and technology.

The beginning of the chapter gives historical context about the advancement of musical instruments and the impact of music on the society. The idea that "music and technology have always co-evolved," on page 59, sparked some thoughts in my mind. Before I read this chapter, it seemed to me that music would often be viewed as a separate field from technology, and that "music technology" often only refers to electronic equipment and methods that produce music. However, upon reading this chapter, I began to realize that music have not only co-evolved with technology but also is technology. If we loosely define technology as the application of scientific concepts and methods to achieve a purpose, then the production of music and the instruments that we produce music with, regardless of whether electricity or computation is involved, could be seen as technology itself because music is always produced by some form of machinery including the body of an organism like humans. Indeed, the production of music is one of the earliest forms of technology, like architecture, that is an essential part of the human existence and continues to evolve. Then, I wonder if we could say it is music that drives advancement in technology, or it is technology that drives advancement in music? Maybe both are true, kind of like a chicken and egg situation.

The idea that "music drives the advancement of technology and technology also drives the advancement of music" parallels the principles 2.2: design inside-out and 2.3: sometimes, function follows form defined later in the chapter. Here, technology is the form while producing music is the function. In the Ocarina example, technically an analog Ocarina emerged first back in ancient times and serves as the inspiration for the creation of the Ocarina on the mobile phone, but then the Ocarina on the mobile phone evolved into its own thing because of the mobile phone technology. The development of music and technology and music technology is essentially a loop where one advancement leads to another.

As I go further into this class, I am increasingly feeling that maybe the way subjects of study are defined in our typical primary and secondary school systems is not the best way to spark interest in young students. Taking music as example, it is often its own subject separate from other forms of art, math, and sciences. But sound and music work because of science and math. Learning about physics and math builds the foundation for understanding why and how sound works and why certain combinations of sounds are more pleasing to the ear than others. Sure, one can learn music theory and produce music without thinking about the underlying fundamentals of physics and math that make up sounds. But why do we not approach music like cooking? As elaborated in the chapter, making music is like cooking. We know that salt has sodium and sugar has glucose in them and that's what makes dishes taste savory or sweet or both, and we know that applying heat to edible things change their texture and taste through chemical processes. We learned these things by spending time in the kitchen and also connecting scientific concepts we learned at school to cooking; why don't we usually do this with music? It's possible that this is partly the outcome of how subjects are structured at early stages of school. Although it's quite unfortunate that the common school subjects tend to be very mutually exclusive in their concepts, I believe that technology does help bridge the gap between these subjects quite well. The video essay that Professor Wang produced about the sublime experience with Aaru is an excellent example - it combines writing, storytelling, sound, music, graphics, video editing all into a medium that expresses messages effectively and creatively. Visual essays would not be possible without technology, yet we perceive the messages through this medium at so much ease because it's just how our brains work - we receive video and audio input at the same time and we also produce both in our head.