Look at a music software interface – particularly a tracker-style interface – and you might easily see something resembling a spreadsheet.
So, why not gaze into the cells of a spreadsheet and begin to imagine music?
Karlsruhe-based electronic artist and programmer Patrick, cappel:nord, had just such a flight of fancy about office software. He explains:
A spreadsheet could be used as a music sequencer. If you know your spreadsheet software well, the built-in functions can be used. I don’t! I also struggle with the interface 🙂 The last time I used spreadsheets is 10 years ago or so.
This was the second time trying this, so I make a lot of mistakes. It’s more a proof of concept. This was a 3-hour hack so don’t expect much from the source code. But here it is:
http://www.cappel-nord.de/files/libre-jam.zip
You have to figure out how it works for yourself. I don’t give any support :-).
I did it for the lulz.
Lots of similar brilliance, sounds, and geekery – like a pixel matrix for Processing, audio players, code, and music – at his blog (not recently updated, but worth plumbing anyway):
Thanks to headchant for the tip!
As it happens, in the first few months of CDM’s existence, I wrote up a little story on what people were doing with Microsoft Excel:
Microsoft Excel for Music: Applications Bizarre and Useful
Applications: building a drum set, a drum machine with sequencer, databases of music, music library tracking, and even a tuning calculator. I’m sure there are more.
I hear these spreadsheets also do something with numbers and finance, but where’s the fun in that?