[microsound] building blocks

[Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> the more they have created this environment that's very
> easy for you to use, the more they've actually determined the kind of
> work you can make with it. If you look at a program like Ableton Live
> which is used by probably about eighty percent of people making sound
> and performing out live these days, it seems like. It's good for a very
> few things, it's good for working with loops, putting effects on these
> loops and sequencing them, but it pushes you in one creative direction,
> it pushes you into making a certain kind of music,
excellent post Derek...thanks!:)
this is a very important subject to me and why I travel the world 
teaching people how to utilize other methods of making music/sound 
art/noise/whatever using tools like Max/MSP (I give equal time to PD 
and FLOSS tools for those with no money to spend)

what end users don't see is the process by which most audio tools come 
about - it can happen a couple ways:
bedroom->internet model:
- Betty Laptop Musician codes an app that does exactly what she wants 
it to
- since she creates a certain type of music this tool aids her in 
accomplishing certain tasks easier, faster i.e. more productively
- she gets kudos from peers on said app and starts to share it with 
others into same kind of music
- demand for tool increases and she decides to make it a 'real app' 
with release cycles, upgrades, added features, bug fixes, some 
promotion, etc
- eventually she is crafting a tool that a particular market wants and 
gears all development towards this market
	- think: Ableton Live

(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?)

some of the other ways audio software gets developed are:
- corporate developers such as Digidesign cater to a pro market; 
development is less focused since the market needs are much wider
	- think: Pro-Tools, Logic, Nuendo, etc
- driven by university research (which is the type of company I was 
involved in at Staccato Systems who developed Synth Builder)...in this 
case development begins as blue-sky research, gets some backing by 
licensing patents or developing industry applications (Staccato had 
gotten their sound engine into some EA video games which worked 
alongside their physics engine)...it becomes a product but has a small 
niche market of researchers, software developers or other academic 
centers as a teaching tool...
	- think: IRCAM, CCRMA, CREATE or GRM
- FLOSS model: developers (mostly non-academic) have an idea for a 
tool, enlist the help of others who need/want same tool, want to make 
it available for free or as open source and tend to develop the app 
based on end user feedback (new features/bug reports)...sometimes this 
intersects with the academic research model...

in each of these processes there are drives to bring a software 
application to market/audience and hence the process is subjected to 
'noisy forces' that shape the tool...
of all of the different methods I am partial to the research model and 
FLOSS models because the tools designed are to be used for 
experimentation and are sometimes extensible thru being able to 
customize the code...
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 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...check out PD (Linux, XP or OS X) or Audio Mulch (XP) if your 
budget is tight or Max/MSP (OS X, XP) or Reaktor (OS X, XP) if you have 
some xmas money left over...



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