Hey, i enter the conversation...
On Thu, 20 Aug 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
I think jmax phoenix has scoping.
That's not what I was alluding to. It was about this part of the paper:
This decision was made to remove a layer of complexity that didn't seem to be strictly necessary in the context of computer music production, in order to make Max as accessible as possible to people who aren't professional computer programmers.
Well, I don't think it's the ?real? (or ?main?) reason for it.
I can't imagine if it is the real (main) reason for it, what can i say is that for sure i would never got so into Pd (and previously Max) if it would have looked like CSound (i'm just too lazy, maybe). I say this 'cause i'm afraid we are loosing this important aspect of Pd during this conversation. I work mostly as an "artist" with good technical knowledge about my favs medium; what i've programmed in my life is only "silly" php, html, css... until i discovered Pd. now i program in Pd, i build my intruments and so on, can i call myself a programmer? the point is that i actually don't care about it. IMHO the importance of Pd has been to "easily" provide the same creative potential both to programmers and artists (and also, let's not forget all the people who is only passionate, but no programming/no arts) fulfilling the historical gap between the two.
(comparisons also become more legitimate when you carefully select the object compared to, according to the number and depth of its similarities...)
^--- i love that... :)
And if "ideally" Pd should be just a "musical instrument" that you only have to "tune and play", it's only to go with those musicians who ideally should understand the breadth and depth of Pd's potential, but in practice don't.
I think Pd shouldn't be _just_ whatever. What Pd can be is so so so so subjective (thanks God, or thanks Miller :P ). But I see a more in depth meaning underlying the concept as "Pd as a musical instrument to tune and play", probably only because this is a topic i'm really concerned about. I think nowadays the celebration of the endless growing potential of technology is overweighting the natural creative power of man. (woo sounds too serious) I see so many people exploiting every nice user-fu....in-friendly software in so amazing way, but then i always would like to tell them... hey, did you ever tought you could also create a preset by yourself? Now... this is not our case, but.. Tune and play a musical instrument means to learn how to physically relate your body to it and to create new compatible strategies to reproduce what you have in mind into/onto/within the instrument. The central subject of this process is the human being and the main goal is to exploit in the most optimized way his ability. Instead with Ableton Live the central subject is how to exploit in the best way the processing capability of the software. IMHO,... these is a relevant difference.
From: Phil Stone pkstone@ucdavis.edu
Projects need excellent criticism; they become moribund without it.
holy words.