[LAU] Bitwig: what we can learn from it

James Harkins jamshark70 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 1 13:40:27 UTC 2014


Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at ...> 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



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