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Fortunately a tool like DirectMusic Producer allows you to focus solely on the issues
related to interactive musical composition. Rather than composing on one hand and thinking
interactive on the other hand and having to somehow smack the two sides together like a
pair of mud pies you can compose interactively from the first step. You only have to
design the components and the structures that will control how they interact. The design
tool does the grunt work. When I first switched from pen and ink composing to MIDI
sequencing I quickly found out I no longer had to transpose for different instruments,
hand ink each instrument part and imagine how the whole thing would sound when completed.
I was amazed at how this freed up my mind to concentrate on the central issues of
composing. My initial experience with Producer has been very similar. Instead of saying to
myself "I want to do this but I first have to find out if it can be done in this
project, figure out how it can be done, and do a lot of file handling and organizing while
trying to compose." I can now say "Here is my motif, here is my chord structure,
here are a few variations on the melody, now let's hear it!" Although I need the
ability to hear the music in my head more now than ever before, it is not being wasted on
simply predicting the sound of a linear composition but in imagining the myriad possible
results of my interactive design. I can make changes to the whole thing by changing the
specific element I was thinking about without having to go through a bunch of other steps
in order to implement it. The variety of techniques I can use to achieve those ends is
vast and I don't have to play tug of war for a programmer to make them available. I am not
trying to say that Producer is what I am excited about or that it is the best thing
around. It is simply the first tool I have seen that truly opens up the field of
interactive composition and I don't expect it to be the last. To me it signals the
beginning of a new era in musical composition. There are a small number of us interactive
composers who think of ourselves in that light but until now have been much like a drummer
banging on rocks and logs. Now we have a real drum set and we are pulling out the big
sticks with eager anticipation.
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