Intermission

It’s the realtime aspect of games and musical instruments that gives them their universal appeal. People can’t stand tools that do not respond in a timely manner, be it software or hardware.

So what happens then when you take something so profoundly clunky that everyone is accustomed to it, and embed the idea of a realtime feedback loop in it? Your users get to travel freely from one parameter set to another. And they will find it much easier to reach interesting parameter subspaces and their sweet spots.

This alone is often enough to turn a complicated-looking system into a playful toy.

Of course, sometimes you still end up wishing everyone had a supercomputer for the number-crunching.