The Nature of Obsolescence and a Case for Creative-coding Environments
I have picked at many different audio software over the last 25 years, many in the first few years I started composing my own music. Being 2005 and access to only an old Windows desktop, the idea of doing any reasonable amount of real-time processing and synthesis was generous. I circled through consumer tools: Fruity Loops, Ableton Live, Reason, and more, all of which are still available today.
This started a thought process recently about the underlying concern amongst electronic musicians that often persists, is that how long until our current toolset becomes obsolete? With hardware it's much simpler, the answer is "whenever it stops working and cannot be repaired". With software, this thought process for me was almost equally as quick because it the answer is, "not anytime even remotely soon", however; this may only apply to choice software tools.
Akai recently purchased Native Instruments. Ableton purchased Cycling '74. LANDR, an "AI music company", purchased Propellerhead. Yamaha purchased Steinberg. Avid purchased Sibelius. With business comes bloat. Business allows for resources to promote ease of use, support, and can cut the initial difficulty of a musician getting set up to do what they do, which is make music. But what happens if that business folds? MakeMusic stopped supporting development of Finale in 2025 and that's it. People who have been using it as far back as 1988 were handed a clock to deprecation. How long will Finale run on existing systems? Or more commonly, what if a software company is acquired to make that software more friendly with an existing product? The example with Avid's purchase of Sibelius was clear. Sibelius 5 was an evolution of a singular product, purchased by Avid to be rolled into Pro Tools as Sibelius 6. The interface changed, the tool was wildly different, and people left it.
The story about obsolescence is not always a technological one, in fact it rarely has to be. Open-source tools don't face the dilemmas of proprietary ones. So long as there is a user base and contributors who find the tool relevant, it will evolve as needed. There are of course caveats to this, but the thought process came in my recent unearthing of some old pieces that I wrote in Csound. Csound has been around since the mid-1980s and was modeled as an ancestor of MUSIC-IV and MUSIC-V. It is still actively maintained and used by many people. I have been reading old texts from Max Mathews and Jean-Claude Risset and you can arguably apply the same manuals, including syntax instruction (almost), to modern day lessons in Csound. It is as if the tools of the 1960s are still available today! (kinda)
That may seem like a stretch but the final point is that with computing becoming powerful enough in the 1990s to handle meaningful real time synthesis and audio processing, some creative-coding environments emerged to support this. At the same time, the music technology industry was in its infancy. What we got were things like Max, PureData, SuperCollider, and ChucK; but since then not a whole lot more. Many universities who teach electronic music outside of proprietary software, teach one of those four languages or a version that sits on top of SuperCollider's server, like Sonic Pi or TidalCycles. Why haven't more environments been developed? Because we don't really need any more than this. Do we? I am leaving Max out of this because it became proprietary after its creation and by all arguments PureData fits all requirements that Max/MSP can fulfill, and I am not speaking for Jitter because I don't know it and it isn't audio! BUT all of these creative-coding environments can run on practically any OS with any specs. Modern computing far exceeds what we had in 2005 by tens of thousands of thousands of times, at minimum. If I bought a decade old computer and installed Csound on it, it has the same obsolescence guarantee as hardware. It will run until it dies and cannot be repaired. And I would still have ample computing power for plenty of projects.
I remain tied to creative-coding environments because this is where true expression lies for me. I can build tools and ideas from scratch and roll them together. I know with certainty that my tools will remain relevant during most, if not all, of my lifetime as long as I am paying attention to the trajectory of things. My work is not tied to a business or their ideas of dishing me out what they think I want in a product. It also took a lot of work, practice, and study to get to this level of expression with creative-coding environments. It's not for everybody! And that is okay. I write this to share thoughts that if you value freedom, reliability, and a guarantee of future reliability with your tool set, really consider picking up the skills on how to use one of these environments! What you learn will inform your music, if not immediately then absolutely over time.
July 20, 2026
Oneonta, NY