Jamie Bullock

Bret Victor talks about his principle that “creators need...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:14:00 +0000

Bret Victor talks about his principle that “creators need an immediate connection with what they create”.

This is brilliant stuff. Skip to 12 minutes if you don’t have much time.

Jonathan Harvey: total immersion

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Seven years ago, my colleague Lamberto Coccioli and I wrote a research paper for the International Computer Music Conference outlining our intentions to develop a new software version of the electronics in Jonathan Harvey’s Madonna of Winter and Spring. Last night the system was used for the first time in public performance at the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s ‘total immersion’ event at the Barbican Centre in London.

Madonna of Winter and Spring is an incredible piece, featuring Symphony Orchestra, amplification, ring modulation, reverb, dual panning, Yamaha TX816, Yamaha DX1 and Emulator II sampler. However, these synthesis components have made the piece cumbersome to perform, with hardware versions being rare and unwieldy to setup and software versions requiring complex combinations of commercial software, some of which is already obsolete.

The new version we have developed as part of the EU-funded Integra Project, attempts to make the electronics for the piece both more sustainable and more performable. It achieves this through the use of a fully open source, entirely software based system, which simple to setup and use. This system runs on two computers and consists of:

the Hexter DX7 emulation plugin by Sean Bolton
a new external for the Pure Data environment, for hosting DSSI plugins
a new software sampler implemented entirely in Pure Data
ring modulation and panning provided by Integra Live

In the Barbican performance last night, the panning was controlled by an iPad running TouchOSC and communicating with Integra Live via wireless MIDI.

The performance was played in its entirety on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now programme. Moments where the synths are prominent include 1:01 - 1:07 and 1:17 - 1:20, although synthesis and electronics appear throughout.

Working with Sound Intermedia and the the BBC Symphony Orchestra this week has been a delight. It has been both exciting and rewarding to see the results of seven years’ work come to fruition. To my knowledge, this marks the first ever use of open source DX7 emulation software for a large scale orchestral work with electronics. The materials we have developed now reside with Harvey’s publishers, Faber Music, and will be used in all future performances.

This is a great achievement for the future performability of works involving DX7-based synthesis and I’d like to thank all who’ve made this possible, specifically Sean Bolton, Miller Puckette, Lamberto Coccioli, Dag Henning Kalvøy and James Dooley. At this moment, I am very proud.

Thoughts on #codingforkids

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:50:00 +0000

This week, government minister Michael Gove announced government plans proposing that current school ICT is replaced by a new Computer Science GCSE. I have no actual numbers for this, but my guess is that most people think this is a great idea. Why wouldn’t we want kids to learn to code?

The tricky part comes when we start to dig into the detail. What will the new curriculum contain? How will it be taught? Who will teach it?

One thing I am clear about is that the choice of programming language should be left to individual teachers and pupils.

What I’d like to see the new curriculum achieve:

sharpen creative and analytical skills through projects and play
understand abstraction and think in an abstracted way
self-teaching through experimentation and research
learn to modularise and classify problems and solutions
understand algorithms, data structures, interface, and state

This is what I personally understand as ‘computational thinking’.

The end results, be it an mobile app, a game, or a robot controller and the languages used, should result from the skills and interests of teachers and students.

Vision: the future of music technology...

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:52:00 +0000

I read with great interest Bret Victor’s rant on the future of interaction design. The starting point for his post is Microsoft’s ‘Productivity Future Vision’, which is intended to be utopian, but actually gives a dystopian and de-humanising portrayal of future interaction.

Bret’s response to the video is inspiring, particularly his definition of tools:

A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities.

Furthermore:

A tool converts what we can do into what we want to do.

Reading this has left me thinking about how I can apply this concept in my own field of music technology research. Traditional musical instruments do the job beautifully: they amplify human gestures, ideas and emotions. Projects I’ve been working on recently have the aim of bringing together music and digital technology, but I feel we are still a long way from creating truly musically-meaningful tools.

I’m not really sure how we’ll get there, but my vision is that we should create digital tools that enable musicians to harness the transformative power of technology through already-learned expressive semantics. Current tools work the other way, and force musicians to understand the semantics of specific technology.

What’s your vision for the future?

*Hammer Images used by kind permission of Bret Victor

What makes something a musical instrument?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:06:00 +0100

I’ve been thinking about this question since my final year as an undergraduate, and explored it in some detail in my M.Phil. thesis. I’ve also blogged about the subject, and discussed it many times. I’m now approaching a kind of opaque definition:

“If we take two performances of a piece, played on the same instrument, with identical articulation, and subtract one performance from the other, we’re left with the instrument”

In other words, to be called a musical instrument something must be capable of nuance.

Mechanical and analogue electronic instruments, are broadly predictable in their behaviour, but at a detailed level they constantly produce small, unpredictable variations in tone and response even with the same playing techniques.

With digital instruments, this capability for nuance and unpredictability isn’t inherent and therefore needs to be added artificially. For me, providing these nuances of interaction remains one of the key challenges of digital instrument design.

*Image by Soophoo from Wikimedia commons

Thoughts on sustainability

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:36:00 +0100

Over the last 7 years at least some part of my professional work has involved dealing with the issue of ‘sustainability’ in music technology. This has largely centred on the question of making musical works with live electronics more sustainable, for instance, by storing data in an application-neutral format or developing software versions of legacy hardware systems.

However, now I’m coming to the end of a six year research project, which has sustainability at its core, I’m starting to question whether we have achieved our sustainability goals…

What is sustainability?

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that this is a sliding scale. It’s not a question of whether something is sustainable or not, but rather how sustainable. Whilst I previously viewed this as a purely technical matter (e.g. binary file formats are less sustainable than text-based formats), I’m starting to look at the problem along a number of separate dimensions, namely: openness, funding and acceptance. A truly sustainable project needs all three.

Openness can be achieved through open licensing and the use of open standards. Funding can potentially be gained through academic or public research funding as well as commercialisation.

Possibly the most important, but also difficult aspect of sustainability to fulfil is ‘acceptance’. In order to be sustainable, software, protocols and standards need to be accepted by communities that use them. Without a community of users, contributors, supporters and developers who ‘accept’ it, a project ultimately becomes redundant.

How Does 'Incremental' Define Apple?

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:01:40 +0100

joewilcox:

I’d like to discuss how Apple innovates, which I understand very well. I posted about Apple’s incremental product strategy last September at Apple Watch: “Apple Demands a High Price to Be Cool.”

The pattern is consistent: Apple launches a “one more thing” product with modest hardware features but something else nevertheless killer—something people want. During the launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs performs his marketing magic, demonstrating how this “one more thing” product will make peoples’ lives better.

Read More

A book about the practice of live electronic music

Sun, 08 May 2011 15:01:00 +0100

…basically there isn’t one.

There seem to three classes of book referring to the subject, the most common are technical books about the theory and techniques of digital audio processing.

Examples include:

Computer Music (Dodge)
Elements of Computer Music (Moore)
Introduction to Computer Music (Collins)
The Computer Music Tutorial (Roads)
Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music (Puckette)

These books are remarkably similar in terms of structure and content. Fundamental digital audio concepts are introduced (bits and bytes), amplitude, periodicity, digital filter theory and delays, frequency domain processing (FFT), synthesis. Additionally psychoacoustics, audio programming, and control processing are usually covered to some extent. Sometimes theory is contextualised with reference to specific musical examples.

Additionally, there are discursive books about history and aesthetics, e.g.

Living Electronic Music (Emmerson)
Electronic and Computer Music (Manning)
Electronic and Experimental Music (Holmes)

These books also share common structure and content. Historical overview starting from Cage’s Imaginary Landscape #1, presentation of the main components of an electronics setup — the microphone to the loudspeaker — the evolution of digital processing, all presented from what might be considered a ‘musicological’ perspective.

Finally, we have books that deal with a specific system or software, e.g.

The Csound Book (Boulanger)
The SuperCollider Book (Wilson, Cottle, Collins)
Electronic Music and Sound Design - Theory and Practice with Max/MSP (Cipriani, Giri)
Loadbang: Programming Electronic Music with Pure Data (Kreidler)

These books take the presentation of techniques in the given software as their starting point, providing theoretical background and practical examples as needed. Techniques are sometimes presented in the context of a given musical work.

What I’m missing is a book that focuses on the music and not the technology or the historical context. So, rather than have a section on score following, with Boulez’ Anthèmes given as an example, let’s have a case study on Anthèmes with score following discussed as one of the many techniques used in the piece.

I’d also like to see discussion about the day-to-day practicalities of running concerts with live electronics. How does the process work? How is the electronics rehearsed? What should a technical rider look like? How do/should composers describe electronics in their scores? How is it notated (if at all)? What materials do publishers hold and how do we use them? How do works transfer between venues? Who maintains the electronics and how?

Also…

examples of ‘typical’ live electronics configurations
common combinations of processing — common musical idioms
approaches to the problems of live electronics and musical time
how to create effective electronics configurations — foreground/background
how to create effective sense of interaction for the performer and audience
electronics and musical style — composers and ‘schools’
scale — differences in approach between small-scale and large-scale works

I guess I’m looking for something between Introducing Music (Karolyi) and Designing Sound (Farnell), at least in spirit.

Maybe I’ll sketch out a chapter outline in a future post…

Max, Integra and the Turing Tar Pit

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:31:58 +0100

With Integra Live, we’re trying to make live sound processing simple for musicians. We achieve this by hiding the complexity of signal processing from our users and exposing only musically-useful controls. This technique is known as abstraction because the user-facing representation is more abstract than that used in the underlying software.

Integra Live modules — simple-to-use, but the implementation details are hidden:

The problem with abstraction is that it limits possibilities. Audio programming environments like Pure Data and Max, remove this limitation by providing low-level processing objects that allow the user to make custom abstractions. This means that users coming from a Max or Pd background often find Integra Live constraining. Conversely, Max represents a Turing Tar Pit, requiring significant technical skill for even basic musical tasks.

Bottom-up approach in Max — the TapDelay~ abstraction is created by connecting low-level objects:

This highlights an interesting design problem: how do we build sound-processing software that makes simple things simple and complex things possible?

My first instinct is that we should invert the Max paradigm and create a top-down approach where high-level modules can be edited through an integrated UI.

Any other thoughts…?

The art of illusion

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:48:00 +0000

This week I had the pleasure of working with the Palindrome dance company for a performance at Birmingham Conservatoire. The company is led by Robert Wechsler, who has spent 10 years researching and developing the EyeCon video motion tracking platform in collaboration with developer Friedrich Weiss.

As part of the performance, the group gave an hour-long workshop in which they talked about their techniques and how they were used. I was particularly interested to hear about their use of motion tracking since Palindrome have developed some of the most effective work I have seen, apparently achieving extremely accurate synchronisation between movement (gesture) and sound (music). The sync seems accurate in terms of both spatial and temporal localisation, for example dancers can trigger sonic events with tiny movements of their fingers or eyes even at some distance from the camera.

I use words like ‘seems accurate’ and ‘apparently’, because it became evident from the workshop that unlike many motion capture systems, EyeCon doesn’t work by giving accurate data about the dancer’s location in 3D space, neither does it capture data about the position of individual body parts. Instead it takes a 2D window of the space and tells us where the dancer is in that window, whether they are intersecting a marked area, the amount of movement within that area and degree of left-right symmetry. It can’t tell us the dancer’s absolute height, but it can tell us if they appear bigger or smaller within the window.

The word ‘appearance’ is critical here because in many regards EyeCon and the Palindrome approach is more about how things appear than how they are. In the following video clip, for example, it appears as though the motion capture system is accurately tracking the movements of eyes and mouth. In reality, it has nothing like that level of detail. Instead it knows roughly where movement is occurring, and the intensity of that movement. The appearance of eye movement controlling sound is an illusion, effectively created through the correlation of movement, motion sensing and audio triggering. We see the eyes move and we hear a sound, so our brains assume that there is some connection between eye movement and sound production. This may be the case, but often the system will just wait for any movement within a given window region and then react.

A Human Conversation from Jamie Bullock on Vimeo.

This approaches something I have used in my own work for a long time, and which I believe very strongly, which is that the audience’s perception of what happens is far more important than what actually happens. The obvious analogy in the world of live electronic music is score following. State of the art score following typically uses a stored model of the musical work (a representation of the score), and tries to match incoming to this model thereby giving a precise temporal location within the score as output. This approach is OK for music where a high degree of reproducibility is required, but personally I’m more interested in creating a more organic sense of interaction for the performer and audience. That is, I’m not so interested in where the performer is within a score, but rather where they are in the space of musical possibilities.

So as live electronics musicians, what can we learn from Palindrome and their approach? I think the key for me is that we need to ‘think smarter’ about how we use our technical resources in order to create synergies between art and technology where the whole is greater than the sum of constituent parts. We need to always be aware of perception and how the human mind always tries to connect cause and effect. For me this is an interesting space to play with both technically and artistically.

2011 computer music conference calendar

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:23:56 +0000

The following is a Google calendar giving the key dates (including paper deadlines) for a selection of 2011 conferences relevant to live electronic music, computer music and music technology research. An iCal file for the calendar can be found here. Enjoy!

2010: a year in search of tempo giusto

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:11:00 +0000

Following my ambitious 2010 New Year’s resolution to read a book-per-week, I started perhaps inappropriately with Carl Honoré In Praise of Slow. ‘Slow’ has the potential to be a life-changing read. It describes a way of life that calls into question the ‘productivity culture’ in modern society, suggesting an alternative based on living (eating, working, loving) more slowly in order to achieve a happier, more fulfilling life. A lot of the ideas presented by Honoré, come out of The Slow Movement and its predecessor Slow Food, the antithesis of ‘fast food’ and ‘ready meals’. All good stuff.

So, inspired the book, I set out to slow down my life. I started growing my own vegetables, making bread, thinking, relaxing, taking time to ‘savour each moment’ etc. For a moment it worked, but for all my good intentions my journey into the world of ‘slow’ was shortlived — quickly the demands of daily life took over as the initial inspiration from In Praise of Slow melted away.

Now at the end of 2010, I find myself reading Do More Faster edited by David Cohen & Brad Feld, an entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur advice book, born out of the TechStars startup accelerator. Do More Faster is an excellent collection of short articles by successful founders, investors and CEO’s sharing their experiences of creating startups. It’s mainly quickfire, practical advice with a common theme of speed — make decisions quickly, fail fast, get feedback early, throw things away etc. The book is written in short easily digestable chunks (1-3 pages) that can be read quickly. It’s not only about speed, but that’s the key advantage of small companies over big ones, writes Cohen.

So what happened? How did I go from “In Praise of Slow” to “Do More Faster”? The truth is, like most people, I live a very busy life: I have 3 small children, a full-time job, a house and garden to maintain and ongoing side projects etc. So, whilst I like the idea of ‘going slow’, it’s not really practical.

One of the key points Honoré makes is that the Slow Philosophy isn’t about doing everything slowly, it’s about achieving ‘tempo giusto’ (the right speed). This means it’s best to do some things quickly and others slowly, as appropriate. The problem is that In Praise of Slow is an exposition on an idea not a practical handbook. It doesn’t really tell you how to achieve slowness, it just says what it is. But here’s the idea: if I do some things quicker, I can do others slower. It’s about balance — simple!

So in 2011, I’ll try to put this into practice and search again for tempo giusto.

Pd getting interesting again

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:03:07 +0000

I lost interest in developments in the Pd community for a while, and stopped following the list. The same problems kept coming up, with no solutions; key external libraries were buggy difficult to get working. I also found I didn’t have time to support my own externals (I like to contribute to communities I’m involved with).

Recently things seem to be changing, and Pd is really getting me excited again. A few things seem to be catalysing this, with specific individuals moving things forward. The RJDJ project has played a big part in this, along with Peter Brinkmann and Peter Kirn pushing libpd to release. This allows Pd to be ‘embedded’ inside a larger program, and importantly, is supported on a number of mobile platforms.

Then there are recent (2010) developments in Matju Bouchard’s Gridflow (similar to Cycling 74’s Jitter), which now has nice installers for multiple platforms, and is a breeze to setup and get productive with.

I’m also interested in Chris Mccormick’s (also of RjDj fame) PyPd project, which enables easy interfacing of Python with Pd.

Also fairly recent (2009) is William Brent’s timbreID project, which provides various audio feature extraction and timbre recognition functions. The resulting system is impressive:

Additionally Pd’s GUI has been rewritten this year, bringing a number of subtle but important usability enhancements, and paving the way for future work. Changes will be available in version 0.43.

Finally, there are numerous changes to the Pd core, including improvements to data structures and bonk~.

Exciting times… just need to make some time to play with all this stuff!

...or equivalent experience

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:39:41 +0000

There has been a lot of reaction and interesting discussion relating to the current government’s proposed cuts to university funding, particularly their impact on arts and humanities. In this post I’ll present some of my own thoughts on the matter.

Many times in reading job adverts or person specifications for jobs, I read the phrase “…or equivalent experience”. The context is usually something like “the candidate must have a degree in computer science or equivalent experience” or “the role requires a PhD or equivalent experience”. Now having taught at two schools, worked for four years at an FE college, studied at three universities to PhD level and worked as university lecturer and tutor, I can say with some authority that the notion of ‘equivalent experience’ is a myth. It’s a concept which trivialises the true value of university education.

The word ‘equivalent’ literally means ‘equal value’, and can also mean ‘of equal significance’, or ‘having the same effect or meaning’. So when we say ‘equivalent experience’, we are implying that it is possible to measure the value added by university education, and that it is in some way possible to gain experience of equal value in the ‘real world’.

I disagree with this on almost every level. I don’t believe it is possible to measure the value of university education (although it may be possible to perceive it); I don’t think there is any process that can provide the same benefits as university education, and I think the polarisation of ‘academia’ and ‘the real world’ as complimentary opposites is a myth — I view the relationship as continuous and reciprocal.

Continuing this line of thinking, I think that ‘…or equivalent qualifications’ is also an inappropriate expression (although I’ve rarely seen it). University study and work experience are simply two different activities offering a different range of skills and knowledge. Both have value, but they don’t have the same kind of value and they are in no way interchangeable.

So how does this relate to the current debate on university funding? Well, I’m inclined to agree at least in part with what Stewart Lee has to say on the matter.

However, whilst Stewart is talking primarily about the arts, I’d go further by adding that we should try to shift the debate towards the value of the pursuit of knowledge for it’s own sake in general. What I would love to see is for universities to become more academic, not more vocational. For some careers (e.g. science, medicine) the two are very closely linked, but for many professions (business, engineering, nursing, teaching!), an academic qualification has little to offer in direct terms — practical, hands-on experience is in these cases a much better qualification.

That’s not to say the fruits a university education have no value in business (for example), they just aren’t equivalent to experience. What university can (and should) produce is individuals with the ability to ask meaningful questions about the world around them, to form a reasoned argument, to value knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge for it’s own sake, to understand the networks and interconnections of people and things…

So, I hope that as universities start to compete for student fees, they sell themselves to their true strengths and don’t simply become factories for the capitalist workplace. If universities do play to their strengths as centres for the pursuit of knowledge, the sector will surely shrink as more potential students enter work instead of study. But as it shrinks over time and clearly defines its role as ‘more than equivalent’, perhaps the university sector will once again become publicly fundable.

The Steve Jobs line of compromise

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:52:00 +0100

I found Steve Job’s rant about Google Android yesterday very interesting, because it highlights something fundamental about Apple: Steve Jobs believes that closed platforms are the price you pay for integration. I’ll call this the Steve Jobs line of compromise:

Apple believes that it can defend its position as essentially a closed-source shop, because there is a deep-seated belief in the company that this is the only way to achieve great user experience. If you build on open source as Google have done with Android, the platform risks fragmentation.

QUESTION: is it possible to build highly integrated platforms on open source models?

Orwell on writing

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:50:29 +0100

A set of rules on clear, straightforward writing from George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I love the concise writing style implied by these rules, but I particularly like rule 6. One problem I find with my own writing is that it can tend to be over-concise; too many words cut out, not enough explanation. Rule 6 asks writers to use the other rules as guidelines and always to use their own judgement. The full essay is well worth a read.

Thanks to @davidortinau for the link.

Reverse development

Tue, 25 May 2010 16:39:00 +0100

For my next project, I’m going to try the following software development method:

This draws upon elements of Test Driven Development and Spiral Model but tries to be lighter-weight. Requirements gathering is eschewed in favour of domain expertise. The screencast building and documentation process is used as a springboard for mockups and graphic designs, and to force user interaction think-through prior to coding.

Any thoughts?

Apple vs Adobe, the battle for abstraction

Sat, 15 May 2010 17:54:18 +0100

Let’s start by making one thing clear: I’ve never been a huge fan of Adobe’s Flash. It always seemed to me, a necessary evil — necessary because it allows publishing on the web that can’t be done with the browser alone, and evil because it requires the installation extra software to access content.

But in the light of recent criticism from Apple, I find myself becoming concerned about the misleading way arguments are being presented. The main reason for this is that Apple’s criticism of Flash, and promotion of HTML5 seems primarily a piece of market positioning: Apple, the champions of open standards, Adobe, the peddlers of all that is closed and proprietary.

Why would Apple do this?

Well, what the Flash vs HTML5 debate does is to hide the real reason for Apple’s anti-Adobe position: Apple wants to control the web publishing abstraction layer. Specifcally, this isn’t really about Adobe at all, this is about any non-Apple software for developing content and applications on the web. Apple isn’t just anti-Flash, they’re anti-Java and anti- anyone else who wants to provide abstraction from the browser and alternative browser-based development platforms. In short, Apple wants WebKit to be your one-stop shop for web publishing on any device.

In theory this seems like a good thing, developers and designers could have one publishing platform, and one set of standards (HTML5 + CSS + JavaScript) all running under a cleanly designed layout engine developed by one of the best software shops in the world and it would look and feel the same wherever they deployed it. To top this, WebKit is even open source. This is why it is gaining traction and now used not just in Apple’s Safari browser, but also in Google’s Chrome, Gnome’s Epiphany and on a large number of mobile devices .

So what are the implications of this? Well, currently if you want your content or app to look and feel exactly the same regardless of browser, you develop in Flash. Flash provides an abstraction layer that isolates the your code from cross-browser differences and incompatibilities. Apple want’s to kill Flash and for WebKit to become the abstraction layer; it wants WebKit not Flash to isolate your code from cross-browser differences. In Apple’s world, Webkit will become the layout engine.

The problem with all of this is that by controlling the publishing abstraction layer, Apple is effectively controlling the type and nature of the content you can publish online. This is the opposite philosophy to the early evolution of the web and browser technology. Instead of being de-centralised and community driven, it looks like the future of the web will be centralised and driven by a few big companies, like Apple and Google.

I leave the reader to decide if all of this is a good thing, but end with the closing thought that the primary aim of big companies it to make money for their shareholders. Apple are not the champions of open standards Steve Jobbs makes them out to be, neither are Adobe evil purveyors of everything closed-source and proprietary. Both companies are open so far as it suits them and only where it means greater control in the marketplace and gain in market advantage.

Ruby by design

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:22:00 +0000

A couple of years ago I was involved in starting a software development project that aimed to bring a focus of usability, good user experience and ‘feel good’ graphic design to open source music creation software. We were discussing potential platforms one day, and my boss suddenly said to me “we should use Ruby”! I was a little taken aback by this. I had been aware of Ruby as a scripting frontend for the Gnome desktop environment, but not as a serious desktop application development language. So why did he suggest it? Well, if you look around at software on the web that has great UI and UX, and great look and feel, Ruby is never far away. In short, people who understand and appreciate great design are attracted to Ruby, and these people employ great designers.

Python comes across as a less-appealing, less-sexy language than Ruby

The Ruby official site is a case in point. It has a nice succinct paragraph telling you what the language is about, set against a simple code example, easy and prominent links to download and get started and a cuddly look ‘n’ feel that makes you want to dive in and get coding. Following the “Success Stories” link, we see that Ruby is used by ‘A List Apart’ and 37Signals; notable gurus of web design and purveyors of good taste.

The Python home page by comparison looks cluttered, and has a clunky opening paragraph. The look ‘n’ feel is clinical and lifeless with no space for the content to ‘breath’. Python’s ‘Success stories’ section is harder to find and more verbose and poorly presented. In short, from the respective websites alone, Python comes across as a less-appealing, less-sexy language than Ruby.

Compare also Ruby on Rails (arguably Ruby’s flagship success story) to other web development frameworks in terms of their marketing:

Ruby on Rails (Ruby)
Django (Python)
CakePHP (PHP)
Catalyst (Perl)

For me the Rails site just gets it right: it’s clear, concise, elegant and exciting. In terms of design, the other frameworks don’t come close.

So… I can see why someone who wants to make a piece of software with focus on usability and great design, might choose Ruby: it has a community of like-minded people around it, all pushing out nicely designed web apps. This isn’t about band-wagon jumping or being a ‘victim’ of marketing or hype, it’s about acknowledging that talent converges around great design. Python, Lua et al, might be well designed languages, they may well be more powerful, more readable or more flexible than Ruby, but if they can’t convey this effectively through their web presence, they won’t attract developers who value great design.

The 'buzz' of live electronics

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:25:20 +0000

We spend a lot of time complaining about live electronic music — the unreliable systems — the complex setups — the unappreciative audiences, performers, composers — the poor documentation — the lack of standards — the lack of a good business model.

Nothing ever seems to work first time. For every piece and every concert we have to painstakingly decipher the work of the original creators in order to unravel some mysterious problem. We untangle cables and untangle code, we restart, rewire and reconfigure until everything works.

But the truth is, when all of the preparation is done, when the problems are solved, when the mixing desk is in place and the speakers are on. When the levels are up and the score is open, when you sit facing the performer and the audience is ready, when the lights are dimmed and the atmosphere is charged; ready for the first note… there’s nothing quite like the ‘buzz’ of live electronics.