Abstract
Pure Data's long appeal is partly owed to its visual layout and intuitive mode of use. This might lead one to consider it a useful pedagogical tool, even if it now meets stiff competition from glitzier and more user-friendly applications. In the author's experience, however, Pd's ambiguous location on the spectrum of virtualization makes it bad for teaching but gives it a far more important function for composers. In occupying an uncanny valley between the digital-as-digital and the digital-as-analog, it resists the general tendency of digital technology to obscure awareness of itself, that is, of the digital computer as the current high watermark of a longer history of rationalization. It thus pushes composers of computer music back towards the questions that are at the heart of their work. This dynamic is illustrated by the author's experience of developing and tinkering with a novel technique of sound synthesis.
Highlights
Pure Data's long appeal is partly owed to its visual layout and intuitive mode of use
In the fall of 2012, my classmate Joe and I crossed the street from the NYU Department of Music to the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where I'd arranged to give a presentation on Pure Data to a group of education scholars
Why would a box with one outlet and two inlets—only one of which triggered anything to compute—be any more intuitive than an old fashioned plus sign? They noted that there was abundant research being done on the role of technology in pedagogy—had we looked at any of that? They gave us a list of people, projects, and books to check out, all of which I promptly forgot about, still thoroughly convinced of Pd's unique explanatory power
Summary
Before I'd ever heard of Pd, I was making bad electronic dance music on digital audio workstations. The sound must have its source in an open space of play and possibility This distinction is made all the more drastic by the fact that much of the gear that DAWs virtualize was originally “analog”, connoting a similar warmth, humanity, and openness when set against the digital. Returning to virtual representations of physical gear, we can see that contemporary DAWs attempt to leverage the perceived warmth of the analog in order to obfuscate the more general thrust of computational technology.. The digital asserts itself against intuition—for example, when the right-toleft processing of objects and inlets disrupts the at-all-once flow intended for a system In his reflections on Max, Puckette suggests that there are aspects of the patching layout that are loaded in terms of Western musical cultural influence—namely, the focus on paper and writing as essential features of music-making I will use an example from my experience programming a Pd external to illustrate how this effect plays out in practice
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