PPIG 2016 - 27th Annual Workshop
Towards spreadsheet tools for end-user music programming
Advait Sarkar
Abstract: SheetMusic, an early-stage prototype, explores how spreadsheets can be used as accessible end-user tools for music programming and data sonification. This design probe uncovers many interesting questions: what are the primary advantages of the spreadsheet paradigm in this context? Should such a tool be regarded as a musical instrument, or as a way to create musical ‘programs’ with emergent runtime behaviour? How can musical experiences be ‘programmatic’? How sophisticated should provisions for scripting the tool be? How can time be represented? Each issue is considered in turn, drawing on previous work in live music coding, end-user programming, and the current SheetMusic implementation.