Well in my opinion most electroacoustic shit is all surrealist/dadaist crap.
The people involved try too hard to be the electronic version of John Cage, it's quite annoying. In fact, I'm so against it that I'm going to come up with a parody album with actual good dance music that uses elements of the academic code geek norm with real electronic music that have titles like "computer scientists make for very bad musicians" and "chainsaw in a cave, recorded 6 feet down"
In all seriousness though, i like the science.
However, I believe that just because it's accepted academically doesn't mean that it will put you ahead of everyone else nor do I like/take part in the elitism that follows which is ten times worse.
I read the CCRMA and IRCAM articles/publications, use Max, Csound, ChucK, and all of that jazz. I even read the Pd/Max/Csound/Chuck mailing lists too but I choose to make actual music with those tools. I use Renoise for sequencing because it can send open sound control data to the extra stuff, then I multitrack it in whatever DAW I feel like using that day whether it's Pro Tools, Live, Logic, DP, or whatever really. Most of what I make is just normal synthesis stuff, like what you would get out of a synth/workstation anyways but I like the fact that I made what I'm using, or heavily modified it if it was sampled.
An off subjerct example but relative is the guys with modular synthesizers. You can go to youtube and see videos with these guys with big huge multithousand dollar Buchla synthesizers and they make this repetitive crap that sounds like it came from lost in space. Then, they just keep turning knobs and it's the same thing for five minutes. It's like, wtf is that trash nobody is going to listen to that...
The technical ability to program synths is great, and I love people who take the time to be scientific about their sound but to me the whole entire point of music is about being technical with a control present. You can look at all of the great classical composers, marching band composers, composers/musicians on labels and find the same thing. If I was to go to school to study music and electronics, and figured out that I can get a plastic drum, destroy an alarm clock to make a contact microphone, and do some basic signal processing I can do much the same thing then I would be asking serious questions.
I guess for someone who's learning, that stuff is fine but these big institutions who teach music already require one to take proper music courses in primary school yet we find 5 minute 20 hz drones everywhere with some white noise. Are the teachers assigning this stuff? Are they mad? I grew up in a super small area in Washington state and I've never been to college so I wouldn't know but what comes out of this circle is baffling.
Perhaps it was just the way I was musically brought up, I don't know. I had a crazy band teacher in primary school who would flunk you if you didn't show up to any of the performances, and dock your grade if you didn't practice so many hours a week that had to be logged and signed by a parent. Plus, you had all the standard music theory stuff, tests on melodic, chromatic, harmonic scales, sometimes the odd ones too, inversions, chords, and so forth. My mom would listen to Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bluegrass music which in my opinion is very technical. I was into house and dance when I was in my preteens to late teens and my mother used to always say that stuff isn't music because it repeats too much. Eventually I saw her wisdom and started listening to lots of Prog Rock and Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Industrial Metal, and stuff like that and it totally changed my view.
I think it's all too easy to get caught up in the technology behind production, and leave the good stuff out. Most of the stuff, including my own that's made with computers just doesn't have that same feel even after I spent 8 hours programming complex drum patterns note by note in a numeric based step sequencer.
However, in my case my own musical control would be the simple math that makes up harmony and melody. Some however can defy this and still make good music, like Sonic Youth for instance or other people who have experimental music actually published on a reputable experimental label. There's still structure there, what is up with this other post-modernist stuff?
Shouldn't artistic enrichment be the goal? Did I miss the boat?
To me, music is controlled noise. You can make a math equation based on chaos theory and apply it to a sequence, but then it becomes noise. You can destroy all sense of scale and timing, but then it becomes noise.
I mean, i can sit there on a synth patch and make noise for 8 hours or I could just go write a song.
Personally, I'll choose to write the song.