"A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it."

Marvin Minsky, "Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas"

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But allow me to recall Michael Scriven's words: "If we want to know why things are as they are..., then the only sense in which there are alternatives to the methods of science is the sense in which we can if we wish abandon our interest in correct answers." As theorists, scholars, teachers, and informed humans, we do want "'to know why things are as they are," and we are interested "'in correct answers". And although I have no wish to confuse "knowing that'" with "knowing how" or the "context of justification" with "the context of discovery," neither am I so timorous or conciliatory or presumptuous as to pronounce that such knowledge will not, can not, or should not "feed back" into [musical] composition.

-- Milton Babbitt (from "Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History", 1972)