The survey is interesting. Thanks for organising, @karst.
It’s interesting in that it does a few things at once. One is it points towards a weighted mean: the thing that would satisfy most survey responses, whilst still not being all things to everyone. In fact, it would probably be disappointing to a lot of people in different, individual, aspects. But it is a kind of consensus. It also feels like a faster horse, so to speak.
I think monome were invoked earlier in the thread, and I really liked @gahlord’s take on things upthread. Particularly noting that whilst monome were namechecked early on in reference to ‘industrial design’, their industrial design stems from a broader perspective, where (imo) a clear, deliberate idea is reified in a very precise manner. There’s a certain degree of authorship going on: look at all the things Arc (for example) both is, and is not, and how clearly it’s defined by what it isn’t as much as what it is. Both its presences and absences are crucial to its haeccity. (And: by trying to explore a single idea to its full conclusion, rather than to be many things to many people, there’s an internal coherence to the devices (arc/grid in particular, I guess). They are blank slates for people to build tools with… but they have really firm boundaries, and that is a strength, imho).
I think if you want to head down that route, you have to examine what the idea of mixing sound is for you, and the ways you could manifest your understanding of it. So there are some interesting discussions around joystick and space earlier on - or the idea that faders are critical to a ‘performance’ mixer, to name some examples. A lot of these ideas are at the edges of the survey responses - but they might be more strongly held than the middle ground is.
Those strong edges get you things like Nearness, which is polarising, but that’s a good thing: people largely immediately know if the idea is interesting to them, or not at all. But you don’t get a Nearness from the middle ground, as it were.
Nothing’s convinced me yet that you can design something that will satisfy everyone here. But given that, doesn’t it make a little more sense to push at edges that are further from “a Mackie 802” than nearer?
(I dunno. I’ll be honest and say that I’m also having flashbacks to the original big 16n thread, both in terms of trying to synthesize everything going on, and already trying to route these ideas into reality in my head, which is… going to be a fun exercise for whoever wants to engage in the matter battle of brining this to life…)
