A couple things about this post: first, the NoteOn/NoteOff dichotomy comes from MIDI. it's pretty reasonable to argue that any other attempt to model music wou

A couple things about this post: first, the NoteOn/NoteOff dichotomy comes from MIDI. it's pretty reasonable to argue that any other attempt to model music would involve sounds both beginning and ending, of course. but when you're designing sounds on a synthesizer, the terminology is Attack (for the start) and Release (for the end). second, the author talks about skipping dynamics, to keep the code simple. so the code implements a subset of what you'd get with traditional music notation, i.e., the dots and squiggles people are talking about when they say they can read music. but "the score is not the music" is a saying among classical performers (iirc), and modern music software (e.g. Logic, Live, DAWs) uses MIDI to express dynamics in much higher resolution than scores can. and even then, "reading" the GUI of a DAW is not going to give you anything more than a mild approximation of what the sound is going to be. I did a talk about programming drum rhythms in CoffeeScript where somebody asked me about jitter, aka swing, which is to say, a mechanism to take a programmed drum beat and make it feel like a human played it. everyone gets that difference subjectively, but there's also some research on what, exactly, in a numerical sense, that difference is. the best "swing" implementation, the Roger Linn system used in MPCs, the Linn Drum, the Tempest, etc., just offsets the 2nd 16th note in every 8th-note "window." http://www.attackmagazine.com/features/roger-linn-swing-groove-magic-mpc-timing/ http://www.attackmagazine.com/features/roger-linn-swing-groo... but with an actual human drummer, the moments when they go too fast, relative to the absolute beat, are offset by moments when they go too slow. (all of this is at nanoscale timing.) to my knowledge, nobody's really gotten algorithms together to express or emulate this yet, although of course modern DAWs have a lot of interesting options, e.g., extracting the "groove" from one sample and applying it to another. my point basically is that the deeper you get into this, the deeper you discover it goes. traditional musical notation is a graphic DSL full of cruft and stupidity, but it takes a lot of work to cook up some code which can cover everything that DSL covers, and if/when you get there, you just discover endlessly more levels of detail to explore. this is awesome if you want to explore it, but agonizing if you want to get from installing a piece of software to making amazing music with it right away. so anyone who makes a library like this has to balance making it comprehensive against making it easy to get started, and in that sense, it's a lot like designing a programming language.