Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer(blog.stackdump.com) |
Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer(blog.stackdump.com) |
Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second layer, and then the parts stack vertically, nicely on top of each other.
It's all to say that I don't really see much advantage in this petri nets paradigm. Even the trigger conditions and probabilities have already been incorporated into a large number of DAWs and hardware sequencers. This feels a little like someone who has discovered fire independently from the rest of civilization, but in this day and age I don't think that counts for much when all they had to do was observe the design paradigms that already exist.
In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool? Does the technique allow us to more easily do something that was previously difficult or tedious? In this case, I'm not yet seeing it.
One of those levels could be context-related microtiming - the context being position in the bar, or the actual shape of the phrase, the position in the phrase, and so on.
This isn't sequencing in the classical sense, it's generative composition.
It's not popular because it's much more abstract and harder to work with than "Play this pattern."
There's a lot of unexplored potential in deterministic systems that work with music at these more abstract levels.
Also - is it just me, or is delivery weirdly off-beat sometimes? Like, isolating to just the kick drums in a standard 4-on-the-floor techno song, it has almost a disorienting amount of delay on some of the beats.
Is just browser jank I think, with JS in browsers it is infamously hard to get the timing right and consistent, sequencing make this painfully obvious.
Everyone else does this on the server and then sends you the results.
If my computer is going to do all the work, then I want all the knobs and sliders too.