Chapter 4 contained a lot of information on coding. At first as a musician, I was prepared to panic because despite knowing some coding from the past month in CCRMA, it still intimidates me. On a side note, I loved that computer music began through the hands of a woman. Lady Ada Lovelace is my new role model. Anyway, back to my point, the idea of looking at coding and programming as design was very fascinating to me. Musicians live in art and design all their lives that they forget how to define it. We tend to defend music when anyone calls it easy or fun. It is fun but it's not easy. The world one day in the Middle Ages used to consider music as science in academia. However, now it is considered humanities. The categorization of music in the humanities box, made us the musicians get comfortable in that box and tend to separate ourselves from sciences as well. So when a musician hears the word "coding", they immediately think "oh that's not for me, that is not my thing". But it is. there's science behind everything in life, just like how there is philosophy behind everything in life. Science it part of music, we just forgot about it. When Ge mentions the THX Deep Note and how it was recreated in Chuck (pages 176-179), it made me think of how a musician would think of suck note. The key, timbre, tempo, feel and all that. While the code interpreted it in a different way. Same elements but in different terminology resulting in the same sound. Well, not exactly the same but similar audio output. This brings me back to Chapter 2 and the distinction between computer music and acoustic instrumental music. There is no competition between the two, they are just different instruments with different sound and purpose. Just like how if you need to play the viola, you need to know the technique alongside the complicated C clef and notation, computer music have coding techniques where each "coder" approaches her or his composition differently using maybe even different languages depending on the way their thought process works. Computer music and coding are a field of instruments of their own. To master them is to master the different options you have to turn an acoustic signal into a notated computer composition as demonstrated with comb filters or other methods on page 195.
Finally, I liked how even though the entire chapter (or the entire book to be fair) is mind-blowing exposing how computer music and design can be creative in new ways, Ge still ends up telling us that "just because it's programmable, doesn't make it interesting". So no matter how impressed we are, we should think "yeah computer music exists, nothing new, but is it sublime? Does it read? Is it fun? Or is it functional?"