Why Free/Libre software is philosophically different approach for creating music?

Free/Libre Software in creating music is something much more than just usage of "ethically good" programs, plug-ins and DAWs. Philosophically it’s a completely different approach to create art. What I’m about to say here might not be as true for traditional genres of music. But it’s certainly true about these kinds of experimental electronic music that tries to break through its own boundaries and create completelty new forms (that are capable of universally expressing all human emotions). Before getting to my point, let’s talk a little bit about history of electronic music, its development, and how this development happens.

Engineers as authors of electronic music

If you look at the history of electronic music, you might notice that it wasn’t made just by musicians. The people who enginineered all these instruments (synthesizers, moduar systems, effects) might be even more responsible for how electronics sounds than musicians themselves. Robert Moog, Don Buchla, John Chowning, Korg and Yamaha teams contributed to history of electronic music just as mush as Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream or Brian Eno did. Engineering & designing the sound is an indispensable part of electronic music. Which means if you are an electonic musician, you also have to be an engineer, a programmer and designer. You need to have opportunity to adapt, improve your instruments for your own tasks & works. Do you get what I’m trying to say?

From Analog to Digital

In 70s-80s you could just buy synthesizer, for example, it physically belonged to you. You could open it up and see its architecture, you could repair it, possibly recreate or change it in the way you want, in the way no one else did. But a lot of things changed, when digital audio came in.

Today, digital audio has surpassed analog; it offers far greater precision, a wider dynamic range, and lower noise levels. It is logical that the industry has shifted to digital, meaning even modern hardware synthesizers are supposed to generate sound digitally rather than through analog circuitry. This is where that illusion Stallman often spoke of really comes into play: you think you are the one giving instructions to your computer, but in reality, a corporation is the one issuing the commands, and the program will heed your instructions only to the extent the corporation permits. In the context of music, this means that corporations produce music, and you can express your individuality only as much as those corporations allow. You can’t extend the functionality of most modern DAWs however you please. Music creation has largely turned into the passive consumption of plugins; just as the listener is forced to "consume" music, the musician is forced to buy & consume plugins. Different plugins come into vogue at different times, influencing the sound of music and dictating what is trendy to experiment with. Yet, a major problem is that no one knows exactly how these plugins work, something crucial for the engineering side of electronic music, especially if you want to push boundaries and go further. While musicians in the past could rewire a synthesizer, that option, most of the times, is completely unavailable to today's musicians. Partly because we’ve been conditioned to believe we shouldn’t have to fuss with it, that making music should be as easy as possible. We hear the plugin's output, which may be excellent, but no one ever learns how it was programmed, what its limits are, or how to transcend them.

Perhaps all these plugins could be improved, taken in a completely different direction, customized, optimized, or modified in unconventional ways for specific use cases. But that isn't possible; one can only write a new plugin from scratch for oneself, not collaboratively, so, technologically we’ve hit a wall. And if we look at the future, none of us is protected from all the main DAWs building AI in or just shaping the process of creating music in the way we don’t want. Musicians who advocate for free software don't seem to talk much about this aspect, likely because they often create more traditional music, I guess. Yet, fundamentally, the future of electronic music and proprietary software are sworn enemies.

P.S. At the same time, the Free/Libre Software side of audio tools remains very underdeveloped today compared to proprietary software. What can we do? Each of us can take a drastic step... We need to move away from proprietary software, write our own plugins, patches, improve and share them, study other people's code and patches, and help others in doing so.