MaxMSP is a music technology program that works like this—you can visually track the flow of information. It might be relevant—I’ll write about it more tomorrow, i’m on a mobile phone at the moment.
Okay, it’s been about two years since I’ve used Max/MSP, and they’ve brought out a significantly different version since then, but this is what I remember.
It’s a program for building musical instruments, patches, and effects. You place objects (which take the form of labelled boxes) on a blank space, and connect them together with wires. The UI is pretty bare—it’s mostly just black and white, though the user can add a degree of their own design to the patch for actual use.
The objects are, for the most part, pretty simple, so it can be quite difficult to achieve even simple tasks. To create a sine tone, you create a specific object that has the “create sine tone function”, input a number (for example 440 - it’s measured in Hz) into it, and output it to an audio control. Building bigger and more complex devices gets pretty dense, and if something isn’t working it can be very difficult to figure out where the problem lies.
That said, I found it quite helpful to have the ability to visually track the flow of information—one exception to the usually black-and-white UI is that wires carrying sound rather than numerical data appear as crosshatched grey and yellow, rather than simple black line.
I’m not sure how helpful this is; I’ve no knowledge of programming, but maybe it’ll serve as a useful comparison.
I spent some time programming with Max (less with MSP) and found roughly the results that others have reported for visual languages. It makes something like an FM synthesizer (y = a sin(b sin (ct))) look a lot more pleasant to a non-programmer musician, but for bigger projects it slows you down and gets in the way and prevents version control etc. But I didn’t spend a lot of time with it, so a grain of salt is needed of course.
MaxMSP is a music technology program that works like this—you can visually track the flow of information. It might be relevant—I’ll write about it more tomorrow, i’m on a mobile phone at the moment.
Okay, it’s been about two years since I’ve used Max/MSP, and they’ve brought out a significantly different version since then, but this is what I remember.
It’s a program for building musical instruments, patches, and effects. You place objects (which take the form of labelled boxes) on a blank space, and connect them together with wires. The UI is pretty bare—it’s mostly just black and white, though the user can add a degree of their own design to the patch for actual use.
The objects are, for the most part, pretty simple, so it can be quite difficult to achieve even simple tasks. To create a sine tone, you create a specific object that has the “create sine tone function”, input a number (for example 440 - it’s measured in Hz) into it, and output it to an audio control. Building bigger and more complex devices gets pretty dense, and if something isn’t working it can be very difficult to figure out where the problem lies.
That said, I found it quite helpful to have the ability to visually track the flow of information—one exception to the usually black-and-white UI is that wires carrying sound rather than numerical data appear as crosshatched grey and yellow, rather than simple black line.
I’m not sure how helpful this is; I’ve no knowledge of programming, but maybe it’ll serve as a useful comparison.
I spent some time programming with Max (less with MSP) and found roughly the results that others have reported for visual languages. It makes something like an FM synthesizer (y = a sin(b sin (ct))) look a lot more pleasant to a non-programmer musician, but for bigger projects it slows you down and gets in the way and prevents version control etc. But I didn’t spend a lot of time with it, so a grain of salt is needed of course.