At Last: *Musical* Software Controls

Intrigued by Scott Bourne's review of Synk Audio Musicbed DV, I watched the screencast on the developer's site...and got even more interested. Musicbed DV is a Mac program that generates soundtracks, but what struck me was the controls it offers: They're labeled with musician terms, not engineering ones.

Instead of knobs and envelopes for quantitative aspects like level, panning, and effects depth, you get controls for emotional aspects such as intensity, realism, and smoothness:

By changing the shape of the lines under the audio clips in Musicbed DV, you can control how the emotional character of the music changes over time. (Click to see full screen.)

Putting the controls for music production into musical terms makes a lot of sense for the target customer who just wants some unique music for a podcast or video. He or she can simply move sliders until things sound right. With typical audio software, it's easy to mess things up (or just give up) if you don't have recording-studio experience.

Think about it: What's the most intimidating audio user interface for newcomers? The mixing board. ("Oh my gosh. Look at all those knobs!") You can explain that once you learn the parts of a single mixer channel you can work any of the 15, 23, or 71-plus others, but even people with very good musical sense will likely still be scared. Even GarageBand, the "music studio for the rest of us," starts by asking what time signature and key you want. Huh?

Since all the processing happens behind the scenes on computers anyway, I'd love to see more programs with controls for the emotional aspects of music. (Bonus points if the names are as visceral as on Funk Logic's Funkerator dial, which goes from "The Bradys" to "Thumb Poppin' Good"!)

And I'm especially intrigued to hear what people will do with these controls. Some of the most interesting compositions in my college electronic music classes were by the students who weren't music majors.