Re: Use Cases and Requirements review

Werther,

Thanks so much for the excellent feedback. A few responses below...

> 
> 2.2 3D game with music and convincing sound effects

You are right, it would be very appropriate to strengthen the game scenario with truly musical effects. Let me try to paraphrase what I think you're saying.

On the one hand you're talking about types of musical transformation that cannot be produced by simply mixing a small number of pre-baked soundscapes -- at the very least, tonal, rhythmic or timbral changes that are dynamically driven by the game play. These are possible when the music is generated on an event-by-event basis, as opposed to being merely played back. Web Audio can enable this approach.

You're also talking about the more typical modern practice of dynamically mixing down a multitrack musical soundscape, and I think we should include this idea in the scenario too.

> 
> 2.5 Music Creation Environment with Sampled Instruments
> This scenario seems to describe not only notation software (which I assume was the intention), but the piano roll functionality I'd expect to be in the DAW use case (2.3). Perhaps they could be merged, or 2.3 could reference the functionality of 2.5? Even though notation software doesn't need audio clips and audio processing, the contrary isn't true. I can't imagine a professional DAW without a capable note editor.

What you say is true; however the 2.3 / 2.5 breakdown was not really trying to capture the real-world feature sets of DAWs and notation apps. It was more about contrasting an audio clip-centric scenario (2.3) and an instrument-synthesis-centric scenario (2.5).  As you say, these could easily be combined (and it would be more accurate with respect to the MI world) but given the limited goals of the document I don't know if this is worth it. A number of the scenarios are a bit limited or stilted in this way in order to focus on one area or another.

I think what would definitely make sense is to add some notes to these two scenarios explaining that the feature sets and choice of notational system are somewhat arbitrary. There's certainly no disrespect intended here to the amazing richness of the music software and instrument world -- it's just hard to do it full justice.

Best,

... .  .    .       Joe

Joe Berkovitz
President

Noteflight LLC
Boston, Mass.
phone: +1 978 314 6271
www.noteflight.com