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solomonbyesterday at 6:41 PM3 repliesview on HN

100% agree.

I think this format of composition is going to encourage a highly repetitive structure to your music. Good programming languages constrain and prevent the construction of bad programs. Applying that to music is effectively going to give you quantization of every dimension of composition.

I'm sure its possible to break out of that but you are fighting an uphill battle.


Replies

rbn3yesterday at 10:24 PM

Quite the opposite actually. certain live coding languages give you the tools to create extremely complex patterns in a very controlled manner, in ways you simply wouldn't be able to do via any other method. the most popular artist exploring these ideas is Kindohm, who is sort of an ambassador figure for the TidalCycles language. Having used TidalCycles myself, the language lends itself particularly well to this kind of stuff as opposed to more traditional song/track structures. And yet it also constrains and prevents the construction of bad programs in a very strict manner via its type system and compiler.

It's also notable for being probably the only Haskell library used almost exclusively by people with no prior knowledge of Haskell, which is an insane feat in itself.

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bigiainyesterday at 10:36 PM

Some of us enjoy highly repetitive music, at least some of the time.

"Computer games don't affect kids. If Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music." -- Marcus Brigstocke (probably?)

Also, related but not - YouTube's algorithm gave me this the other day - showing how to reconstruct the beat of Blue Monday by New Order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msZCv0_rBO4

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cdr6934yesterday at 7:18 PM

The ease of quantization in the DAW is pretty easy to do as well. So I am not sure that would be unique to music / live coding sessions.

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