I agree that any serious composing needs a visual, direct manipulation UI. In fact I think most design and programming tasks could benefit from a metric boatload of research and progress in that area. Things like Jonathan Edwards's subtext, or (from what I can gather) what Lotus Improv was trying to be.
I see the Beats project (it's not mine, I just found it via the github blog) as basically a text mode, slightly more flexible version of a Tenori-on. It could help people who are familiar with the basic on-screen functionality of Tenori-on or its knockoffs grasp the ideas behind a text-based procedural programming language. But I don't think it would be very useful if it were more complicated, as you're likely to end up re-inventing the UI of a 90s MOD tracker, just with an additional edit-compile-play step. I haven't tried to use any of the serious sequencers in anger, but I've often pondered their user-interfaces and been awestruck at just how terrible they appear to be. There has to be a way you can have a sensible superset of the core Tenori-on UI concept that would get 90% of the users 90% of what they need for non-professional composition. As a UI-focused sort of fellow, it's one of those things I'd love to try my hand at, given 12 months and somebody to do the sound programming for me :) I'm not sure a subroutine is the correct metaphor for music, but there definitely needs to be a way for the user to break a composition up into other smaller compositions. And also to base new "sub-compositions" on existing structure, with the system smart enough to track and make use of this heritage sensibly. I think we as programmers are too focused on composition/aggregation and inheritance, and not enough on managed mutation. Cheers, -Josh On 17 May 2011 14:22, Ian Piumarta <i...@vpri.org> wrote: > Dear Josh, > > Thanks for posting this! > > > Thought you guys would get a kick out of this YAML->WAV sequencer written > in Ruby: > > https://github.com/jstrait/beats > > I think this is pretty cool. (It puts us well on the way to archiving the > entire output of Kraftkwerk as ASCII files. ;-) However... > > Music is one area where direct manipulation clearly wins over the command > line. So... I'm curious what you (generically) think about what's missing > from this representation, and how it might be added back, to reach the > expressiveness of (for example) a well-made MIDI track. (The largest amount > of time assembling a nice-sounding MIDI track is not inputting the basic > timing and pitch/instrument information but rather in tweaking the > velocities, expression, etc., to make it sound like humans are performing.) > > I'm also curious what you (generically) think could/should be added to this > to make a full-blown sequencing language, capable of representing (e.g.) > anything that can be programmed/manipulated graphically in something like > Ableton Live. I've always had a slightly frustrating experience with > Ableton (and Garbage Band, etc.) feeling that the semantic content of an > assembled track is a lot less than the amount of manipulation required to > achieve the final result: copy and paste is a (very) poor substitute for > subroutines! On the other hand, I have no idea if a written representation > could be much more (or even anything like) as concise. Maybe a combination > of the two is needed? > > FWIW, it's worth following the link to the author's other projects. > Degrafa, in particular, is very interesting. > > Regards, > Ian > > > "Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." > > Semper Donne, semper dolens. :-) > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > -- "Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." Josh 'G-Funk' McDonald - j...@joshmcdonald.info - http://twitter.com/sophistifunk - http://flex.joshmcdonald.info/
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