alt Hacker NewsI see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on.
Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second layer, and then the parts stack vertically, nicely on top of each other.
It's all to say that I don't really see much advantage in this petri nets paradigm. Even the trigger conditions and probabilities have already been incorporated into a large number of DAWs and hardware sequencers. This feels a little like someone who has discovered fire independently from the rest of civilization, but in this day and age I don't think that counts for much when all they had to do was observe the design paradigms that already exist.
In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool? Does the technique allow us to more easily do something that was previously difficult or tedious? In this case, I'm not yet seeing it.
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The only flaw i see in your reasoning is trying to optimize a creative process. Piano rolls may be technically better, but since the majority of music is made with a piano roll you can use other types of interfaces to break out of the mental ruts a piano roll creates in your thinking. Music making isn't about best - it’s about creativity and inspiration and lateral thinking.
> In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool?
hating on OP for being AI slop is fully legit imo (sorry OP) but don't judge the concept on this example. the rotary sequencer model's actually quite effective. there's lots of niche software and Eurorack modules which implement it, e.g., Moskwa (and Moskwa II) from Xaoc Devices.
here's a YouTube video which shows Moskwa II in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-6n_E9WIfQ
btw the first rotary sequencer was probably Raymond Scott's Circle Machine from 1958:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110927232227/http://raymondsco...
I make beats with Patterning on iPad all the time. It's a fantastic sequencing surface. The main advantage over a traditional horizontal sequencer is that time at the measure level is represented much more naturally (as a loop), which makes polyrhythms and track offsets (both common when putting together more interesting sounding, swung beats) easier to visualize and manipulate with confidence. It's also arguably a bit easier to visually reason about symmetry / 'rhyming' across beats, when making step changes - a much more minor improvement but noticeable to me (I'm highly visual).