[LAD] Something like Processing for audio

[Fons Adriaensen]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 11:32:41PM +0200, Paul Davis wrote:

> Actually, I'm not sure I see much benefit when
> people get to use computers, period.

:-)

> This is like the explosion of
> desktop publishing when everybody and their buddy thought
> they understood typography, typesetting and graphic design.

Last week we had some festivities here and people
had to be invited. My boss (windows user) worked
for most of the day on the invitation and still
wasn't satisfied with the result. He came to me
with a printed version and said "This looks ugly
(he was right). When you make a stupid slide with
four lines of text for your presentations it looks
good. Can you redo this ?" And of course I did -
ten minutes work using Latex.

Now is there a relation between the fact that Latex
is a 'hard to use' old style, non-wysiwyg tool and
the fact that it produces much better typesetting
than MS word ? I think there is - even if it may
not be simple to exactly find out why.

> the thing is that about 40 years ago, the first modular synths started
> to appear, and people complained about them in exactly the same way that
> people complain about supercollider now. then came the minimoog, which
> begat the polymoog and then the prophet 5 and the the DX7 and so forth,
> until we got synths that nobody had to know anything whatsoever about
> synthesis in order to use. and now things have settled down, and there
> is some space for the contemporary equivalents of the DX7, but there is
> also understanding of the quintessential values of the modular synth
> too. and you're talking to a bunch of people who would probably be happy
> building modular synths, let alone actually using them.

Plus the simple observation that once we had the synths
that nobody needed to understand whatsoever about, most
synth music, with few exceptions, degraded to junk food
quality levels. 

Ciao,

-- 
FA

Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica
Parma, Italia

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