Chapter 4 of Artful Design gets more specific into the world of programming and computers with regard to sound design and music. The author likens computer music to cooking with raw ingredients, which is certainly how I felt when I first started using Chuck and for the first time had to create music starting with sine waves. It gave me a much better understanding of sound, but I realized how much easier it was creating music with say an instrument like a viola. It takes a lot more time, effort, and ingredients to create a flavorful and rich dish from scratch, and I feel the exact same way about making sound with computer programming. However, you have much more control over what you put into it. I fluctuate between whether or not I believe it puts the composer at an artistic advantage or disadvantage. There is an added scientific challenge to it, but Principle 4.1 would define programming as a creative endeavour itself. Of course through things like automations, you can run into many happy coincidences in computer music that wouldn’t otherwise arise. I personally the hardest part is to understand the aesthetic landscape of computer music and lean into it in order to use it to your advantage. Meanwhile, I keep trying to emulate the more classical and acoustic sound I understand better, which is the wrong approach. The chapter emphasizes how time is integral to both music. I had to wrap my head around the idea of music being about timing, but soon it made sense especially when I thought about percussion instruments. Percussion without timing is just noise. This is a huge reason why Chuck is designed around the passage of time. My very first Chuck program didn’t make a sound because I didn’t pass time. Then I thought about how passing time in Chuck is similar to creating say a quarter note in a score. Thinking of programming computer music in the terms I’m used to is helpful for conceptualizing it. I still have a love-hate relationship with computer music, but I think I have to simply embrace the precision, automation, randomness and other features of computer music and lean into the aesthetics. In fact, back to the point about NOT trying to recreate say acoustic music in Chuck, which just so happens to align with Principle 4.5 stating that you should NOT design things on a computer that would be possible without it. The challenge in that lies in the fact that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what computers are capable of sound design wise. I think that will just come with time and experience, but the book did provide some examples from simple bleep bloops to the THX deep note, plus another strategy lies in Principle 4.8 where you take things to the extremes and scale back from there.