hi
On 6/7/07, David Powers cyborgk@gmail.com wrote:
I really think it's just absurd to force all musicians into a model that may only make sense from the software engineering / DSP side of things. I usually am arguing more on the pro-technology side of things, but in this case I think I must remind people : you don't need a computer to make music.
of course that is true. all you really need is your voice [or 'love' if you're a beatle wannabe] ...
but if you want to do electronic music, with any degree of sophistication, you need to learn the tools. i guess i get a bit irritated when people think that computer music should be immediately accessible to them- then get upset when they find out they need to understand something about how computers work with audio in order to get what they want out of them. they think they can just press a button and ...
if you just sit down at a piano and don't know anything about it, you might get some nice stuff out- but it's more a matter of serendipity than anything. you practice to get better.
computers use math to do audio [dsp, convolution, ...]. so you need to study math [not really that much for most applications, but it does help]. and learning a programming language in some way will help too. musicians have been doing math for a long time [at least since pythagorean tunings, if not before]. and i don't even know about chinese or indian or arab or X traditions. [using algebra in a sentence there]
also the jump from composition to programming is really not that great. it's all about flow control ...