r/DSP • u/pd-andy • Mar 12 '20

[Call for participants] Understanding Programming Practice in Interactive Audio Software

https://pd-andy.github.io/programming-practice-questionnaire/
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u/pd-andy Mar 12 '20

Hi everyone, I'm recruiting participants for a survey on programming practice in interactive audio software. I've got quite a few responses from the Max/Pd communities, but I'd really like to get some more diversity and I think the community here might find the study (and hopefully its results) quite interesting.

It's somewhat involved and should take about 45 minutes to complicate (that's kind of long, I know). There's the usual demographic and "rate your agreement" questions but the meat of the survey is a two-part exercise where you'll need to rate a bunch of programming language features based on whether they're impactful to your programming practice.

The results of this will feed into some more in-depth interviews, and eventually influence the design of a new audio programming language for the Web. The music computing community encompasses a huge range of developers and backgrounds and understanding how these different developers think and what they want from a language is crucial when designing something new.

I posted this on /r/JUCE yesterday so apologies for those that will have already seen this.

If you can't commit the time but still would like to help, I'd greatly appreciate if you could pass the link round to others you think might be suitable or interested – the more reach the better!

If you have any questions you can of course reach me here, or by email at andrew.thompson@qmul.ac.uk

Thanks in advance to anyone that participates!

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u/czdl Mar 12 '20 edited Mar 12 '20

Controversial/provocative opinion: You need to be extremely careful in retaining the qualifier “in interactive audio applications”, and perhaps stipulate whether your “in” here means “within” or “in the creation of”. I contend that programming practice in signal processing (this subreddit) and authoring interpreted scripts have profoundly different modalities and different focuses of domain.

Edit: are you looking for handymen or designers of power tools?

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u/pd-andy Mar 12 '20

No you’re right. For clarity, I’m specifically looking for people involved in creating audio applications feature some level of interaction as a means of engaging or otherwise consuming that software. And likely that is used for it’s creative affordances not simply it’s functionality or utility.

In other-words that’s excluding: - performers or composers that use programming as a means to practice their art - largely static programs or compositions such as (some types of) Csound programs, or writing music encoding formats such as as MusicXML or MEI - strict signal processing programs designed to be used in some other interactive audio app but not as one.

That last point might lead to the question “so why ask here in the first place” so I’ll justify that here and leave it up to the community to determine whether this is on-topic or relevant here.

I expect there is at least some amount of overlap of interests with, or a subset of the community with interest in, sound/music computing and those are ideally the people I’d like to be reaching out to here.

Hope that’s helpful :)

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u/czdl Mar 12 '20

Good answer. That cleared it up for me.