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