Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...> writes: > > On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 6:33 PM, James Harkins wrote: > > > Well, in that case, it's a good thing I didn't read your message before I > > started... making music with SuperCollider tonight :-p This one's in 4/4 > > time, even. > > Er, isn't it just a matter of taste? :) > > Gordon basically summarized (in a rather arguable manner) a point that > we've discussed time and time again: if Linux audio is for geeks or > for full-time musicians. I don't see it. Surely, if he had wanted to make that point, he could have said it plainly? I'm interested in music that seems like it's repeating but doesn't actually repeat loops exactly. Even when I was using DAWs, I was doing that (painfully). In SC, instead of tweaking MIDI notes and rhythms by hand, I can develop constraints that generate notes and rhythms that always vary, but maintain some sense of coherence. Like, the other night I was fixing some mistakes in a chord player that: - Chooses 16th-note time points within the bar, according to some rules that make it less likely to have chords in successive 16ths; - Chooses the top note of the chord mainly by stepwise motion; - Weights the remaining scale degrees to have a higher probability of choosing the third and fifth above the current bass note, medium probability of the seventh and ninth, and lower probability of the fourth and sixth (since these can change the chord function). The resulting chords actually do sound like they fit in the harmonic context, and it can keep going like that, without ever looping. That's one way that SC is the best tool for me to make the kinds of evolving processes I like to hear. The point being that this sort of geekery a/ comes directly from a musical impulse (I can hear if the implementation isn't doing what I heard in my head) and b/ is grounded in a musical understanding of harmony (in fact, it models part of my thought process when I'm writing harmony by hand). But never mind that -- if I were writing dots on paper and debating whether to use interlocking woodwind voicing or not, THAT sort of geekery would be perfectly musical, but the fact that this particular music geekery is in SC means that it's... what was the phrase? "Autistic savant computer genius" territory. I don't know Bitwig, so I have no basis to evaluate Robin's assertion that it's a "toy." If he had said DAWs are toys compared to SC, I'd call that idiotic -- but he said that of only one DAW which is relatively new and may not be full-featured yet. I understand the wish to evangelize on behalf of under-appreciated software (you should see me rub LilyPond in Finale users' noses), but I would not claim SC to be inherently better than other electronic music workflows (e.g. DAWs). But to claim, as Gordon did, that there is not even one single musical impulse for which a domain-specific programming language is an appropriate tool? Just... wow, seriously? Oh! I just remembered, it's April 1. Silly me, Gordon must have been joking! Carry on, then. hjh _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
