Science & Tech Quote by David Tudor

Tudor’s line lands like a polite door-slam on the tech-utopian mood that’s haunted experimental music since the first oscillators started humming. “Arouse any interest in myself” isn’t just personal taste; it’s a subtle jab at the way digital audio invites a certain kind of fascination: the fascination of control. If analog and acoustic sound are negotiations with friction, drift, and failure, then “digitally produced sound” can feel like a sealed container: precise, repeatable, optimized. Tudor, a musician who thrived on unpredictability and on systems that misbehave in interesting ways, is saying that boredom is an aesthetic problem, not a moral one. The computer “turns me off” because it turns the world into parameters.

The subtext is also about labor and authorship. Tudor came up as a virtuoso interpreter of John Cage, then evolved into a builder-performer whose music often depended on live circuitry, feedback, and unstable interactions. Early digital tools pushed composition toward premeditation and playback, away from the sweaty intimacy of performance-as-discovery. His phrasing makes the “computer” sound less like an instrument than a managerial layer between the musician and the event.

Context matters: in Tudor’s later decades, “digital” often meant brittle timbres, limited resolution, and an ideology of cleanliness. Today’s laptop music can be messy and tactile, but Tudor’s complaint still hits: when a tool promises infinite options, it can also flatten curiosity into browsing. He’s defending a practice where sound isn’t manufactured; it’s provoked.