[LAU] Bitwig: what we can learn from it

[James Harkins]

Gordon JC Pearce <gordonjcp at ...> writes:

> But Csound and Supercollider are not suitable for making music.  They're
fine if you're some kind of
> autistic savant computer genius, but utterly fucking useless if you're a
musician.

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.

Oh, and if you heard BT's "This Binary Universe," you heard Csound in the
first track (as in, that track is *all* Csound). Sure sounded a lot like A
aeolian to me... but maybe it actually is unmusical just because of the tool
he used. I thought it was pretty.

I'd draw a parallel between programming languages for music and Western
notation. Both are technical, complex symbolic systems that take a hefty
time investment to master. It's not at all farfetched to argue that writing
tens of thousands of dots in precise places on ruled paper, as, say, Mahler
did in any single symphony, constitutes an act of autistic-savant
persistence (in the days before computer notation, when scores and parts had
to be copied by hand before the premiere). When you really think about it,
it's insane... but it makes music.

Writing code to make music is also insane... but in the hands of someone who
works at it, it makes music.

hjh