brettworks

(Photo: Frederick Stubbs)

Programming music is like making marionettes dance by pulling on their strings. Unlike acoustic musicians who pull their own strings, the electronic music producer is one level removed from the action, conducting puppet parts from afar. Programming entails many processes, including playing or drawing MIDI, finagling audio samples, plotting effects trajectories over time, and editing sounds into arrangement structures on the screen. Programming is live performance’s next best thing—an approximation, a sleight of hand, a simultaneous jingle-jangling of music’s parts to impart the semblance of motion, the sensation of coming alive at many levels at once.