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2 points·osetinsky··2 comments

Text-based interfaces trump any GUI-heavy ones like Ableton and Logic when it comes to making the musical creation process open and collaborative. Modern MIDI sequencers weren't designed for portability or remote collaboration, they're simply what electronic musicians are accustomed to using for making their music.

Nonsense. If text-based sharing was so great, why do musicians depend so heavily on MIDI and its successor OSC? The whole point of protocols like these is that they're independent of DAW conventions. Hardly anyone outside of the academy likes writing code to make music; if they need seriously fine-grained control they use something like Max/MSP, Reaktor, PD or Kyma.

I don't think we're near the point where it's common for musicians to be making music with code, but I think it's coming.

Supercollider is ~18 years old and Csound about twice that. Code-based composition made a great deal of sense when almost all DSP processing had to take place offline, and is still great for developing audio software, but I don't ever see code for compoasition appealing to more than a tiny niche of musicians because a) it is so hideously abstract and b) realtime tools are so good.

I'm not saying that MIDI or DAWs aren't useful tools for making music, just that they aren't ideal for making music collaboratively. And if we're getting into the ages of these technologies, MIDI is in its 30s.

More and more young people are starting to code, so I don't think that code-based composition growing outside of the niche you say it lives in is too far-fetched, or far away.

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