HOW JUST BLAZE VERY NEARLY BECAME A PROGRAMMER
All music can actually be defined on paper without the use of scales and meter. In fact, a simple tone like an A note on the piano, can be written mathematically and reproduced many times. The struggle with early electronic music was to find way to control sound without having to break it down to the simplest of axioms. Programs like Ableton can tackle complex tasks, and when a single song is produced – it requires a lengthy amount of legwork to be done (which is eventually translated into 1’s and 0’s for the computer to read). Early music making in digital devices had to be done using numbers, rather than symbols. Think of the early pagers and cellular phones that did not have the ability to record and playback music. These would still play simple 16-bit melodies – but actually creating them required sort of a programming background as well as a musical background. The fun part happens when the complexity is taken out of the experiment, and it becomes more of a trial and error process rather than a language learning process. Today, ring tones aren’t the selling point when it comes to buying a phone – but it sure makes it more fun to play with. http://www.factmag.com/2013/08/15/from-hacks-to-beats-how-just-blaze-very-nearly-became-a-programmer/