On 2/25/12 9:23 AM, Charles Turner wrote:
My point was that the checkpoint raised by callbacks feeding a sample buffer may come from resistances outside the technical world. Boulez sees timbre as the enemy of harmony. Could very well be that the callback is the result of a cultural outlook, and not the result of engineering design…
I think there's an interesting analogy to things that happened with Western musical notation in the 20th century. Standard Western notation treats measures a bit like buffers -- they need to be there whether there's anything happening or not. A full orchestral score can be largely made of up thousands of rests. Measures mark time in a more or less linear way. A measure can be subdivided up into a certain number of chunks and all of those chunks need to be accounted for in every measure. Etc.
But lots of composers have resisted these things, and the 20th century saw many experiments with either tweaking traditional notation or just inventing totally new ways of describing music on a page. A curious aspect of both filling buffers with samples and putting notes and rests on a page is that there's an assumption that the musicians (or the algorithms or whatever) are always "on", but that sometimes they're just not making any sound.
But that's not really how live musicians tend to think of it. It's not like a violinist keeps her bow moving at all times and only touches it to the strings when there's a note to be played. But that's kinda what sending zeros to a buffer when there's no sound is like.
On the other hand, if you work directly in hardware (say using an analog synth, hooking up logical oscillators, or programming a microcontroller) you can take a very different approach. You twiddle some output pins when you want sound and when you don't want sound you can just go off and do other things. In many ways I think that's a lot more like what many musicians do -- when you're not playing (either because you've got a bunch of rests, or maybe you're playing improvised music and you're just sitting out for awhile, or whatever) you don't really sit there counting off the beats. You stop playing. You might think about other things. After awhile hopefully you'll notice that the conductor is about to cue you in, or you get an idea and decide to join the improvisation, etc. I've seen people reading books in Broadway orchestra pits...
I don't know that there's a useful connection to different ways of thinking about writing DSP routines, but I think the analogy is interesting.
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