[PD] Open source + musical composition?

[Derek Kwan]

> Hi everyone,
> 
> 
> I would love to know if anyone feels like there is a direct
> relationship between the music they make with Pd and the fact that
> Pd is open source. Do you compose music differently than you would
> with a purchased software package? Are your sonic standards higher /
> lower / unchanged? Are you more / less musically adventurous (what
> ever that might mean to you)? Are you more / less likely to use sounds
> from other users?

I suppose I pretty much exclusively work with open source tools so my
perspective is a bit skewed (I also went through school studying music so
this adds an additional bias), but I think paradigm and interface has much
much more to do with compositional style than software being open source
or not: DAWs and trackers emphasizing the metrical grid, while Pd and SC
being more freeform and sandboxy, SC having its extensive list of patterns
and tempo clocks (although I've been lately kinda doing this sort of thing
with in Pd with sequenced lists), Pd with its graphical dataflow interface,
perhaps emphasizing musical experiences that involve more pre-coded
modules hooked together and tweaked live via sliders and buttons (I
actually haven't thought about this much, forgive me, lol).

I suppose that perhaps there are folks who are comfortable with solely
using commercial products and folks who want to use open-source as much
as possible (and people in the middle) and definitely in the popular
music fields commercial products dominate. I'd say that open-source
programming-oriented music environments have been more historically
associated with academic institutions and thus "western art music" for
lack of better terms (although I'm not really fond of that term), but
there are folks leaning more on the "popular" side of things (not fond
of that term either...) that do use Pd. However, I'd also say Pd's
closest cousin Max/MSP has also been pretty historically tied to academic
institions and the genres associated with such as well, although there are
again folks who use Max/MSP for more "popular"-influenced music such as
Autechre. Also, I suspect that these conceptions are changing,
especially as the emergence of "creative coding" brings the expressivity
of computer-technology-powered art to more and more people.

I suppose since open-source software tends to be more community-driven
than there could be  more of a proclivity to share code and sounds and so
forth, but Max/MSP code also gets shared a lot and in terms of sampled
sounds, well,  sampling has been a thing for a long time... In my own
experience, study of Pd's source has allowed me to learn and develop my
own tools, but I wouldn't say that this necessarily leads to any sort of
style of music. I'd say that perhaps with commercial products, you would
expect more-polished and thorough documentation, but this isn't always
the case. I'm not sure if I answered your questions at all...

Derek

-- 
Derek Kwan
www.derekxkwan.com