[microsound] Open choices, open sources, open mouth :-)

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>]

Kim Cascone provides some food for thought:

> (sidebar question: why did Ableton Live become so wildly popular when
> Sonic Foundry's ACID had been out for some time before Live was
> introduced to the market?)

Because after ACID 1.0 came out, the absolutely obvious choice
would have been to work on creating a version or interface and
set of features geared for live performance. For whatever reason
(I expect it had to do with an in-house product competing for
scarce engineering resources, but I could be wrong), that never
happened.

The more interesting essay question for me is slightly different:
Why was it that Live went out the door and became a kind of
scratchpad *production* rather than *performance* environment
right away?

My own and somewhat limited experience with Live live is that
its identification with a certain kind of output is largely due to the
fact that very few performers appear to do much with it using stuff
like input sources (in my case, Max/MSP - but I'm um... biased),
ReWire, and something other than the "drop loops into the vertical
hopper" approach. In situations where one adds plug-in functionality
and the ability to either manipulate complex control curves for said
plug-ins or (as in the case of pluggo, which - again - is my bias set)
having plug-ins that send/receive audio and modulate other plug-ins,
the possibilities further increase. Of course, if the live gigs I've
seen
are much to go by, none of that appears to be very common practice.

The arrival of 4.0 has dramatically increased the possibilities, as
well.

> I know Max/MSP is not open source (my excuse: I had bought it years ago
> when I had a 'real job' which was before the explosion of FLOSS) but it
> allows me to tinker in a laboratory environment of building blocks that
> operate on numbers and this fits my needs perfectly...I use Max/MSP for
> 99% of all my work (except for editing tasks for which I use Peak and
> sometimes Audacity on OS X) because I am not constrained by what the
> manufacturer thinks I want to be able to do...I am given a set of
> primitives (more atomic than most; more granular than some) with which
> to work and allows me to implement just about any music/audio related
> idea I can think of...

I would hope that no one needs to apologize for spending money
on the tools they use for work, Kim - any more than one should
rationalize using Open Source software for some bizarre reason.

While this may slightly offend the binary orthodoxies some narratives
of Open Source might assume or assert, there are also ways
in which non-open source products may allow for extensibility via
SDKs, etc. The Max/MSP world is full of a variety of third-party
extensions
from individuals and institutions who, themselves, might fit the basic
typologies of development Kim describes, and who produce extensions
that involve remuneration for the purpose of helping to provide a
sustainable
existence for the developer (cf. the auv-i objects for Jitter) or an
institution
(IRCAM's Forum IRCAM stuff) or who make their individual works (the
jasch objects) or products of their institutions (CNMAT's OSC/sinusoidal
resonator work, the PeRColate objects for MSP) available at no
cost, sometimes with source code included.

There are also times in which that extensibility may also involve
providing ways in which users can more easily create or manipulate
their own objects using different tools; the addition of support for
both Java and javascript for Max/MSP and (quite soon) Jitter has
apparently increased what users can individually create and share
as they see fit. The current realities are actually pretty refined and
nuanced, in my opinion.

> I concur with Derek: people really ought to try to break out of the
> pre-fab, shrink-wrapped software world and try to make their own
> tools...

I quite agree as well, and would point out that this increase in
available tools - both Open Source and otherwise - should, I
hope, be an opportunity for users to choose tools for a wider
variety of reasons than mere price and functionality: for essentially
ideological reasons (or a desire to rid oneself of the negative
energy associated with making a living out of cracks, if you inhabit
a universe in which this might be the case), for reasons of personal
preference (I hate command line interfaces/I want loops/etc.), for
reasons of convenience, and so on. I think that it's great to be able
to choose tools on the basis of whether or not they match my task
or temperament, and to do so in an environment where I can exchange
my money for something, or invest my time instead.

This notion that users might like to explore even more "fixed"
sets of commercial software appears to have some wide acceptance;
a friend attending a Native Instruments soirée in L.A. reported that
the new Reaktor was being hyped as "the closest thing to low level
DSP processing ever" (which would surprise any number of us, I
think), and spending a lot of time talking about educational approaches,
which would - I assume - involve learing to fiddle with NI blocks.

As ever, your mileage may vary.

gregory

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