Software Development and Music

About this Episode

The panel explores the connection between programming and music. To begin, Mike shares how his passion for music influenced his career switch from molecular biology to software development, and each panelist reveals their musical experiences, ranging from choir participation and band membership to a keen interest in diverse music genres and car audio systems.

The discussion then delves into the similarities between music and software development, focusing on how both are forms of human-centric communication and creative expression. They discuss the importance of comprehensible coding for human understanding rather than for machine processing and draw parallels in communication styles and improvisational aspects of both fields.

The episode also features a live interactive segment on the integration of music and software, through the use of Sonic Pi. This tool demonstrates the practical blending of coding and music creation, exemplifying the tangible overlaps between these two creative domains.

Transcript;

MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development podcast. A lot of times, we go with more technical topics, and it's still a technical topic today but taking a different approach than we often do. Today, we're going to talk about the overlap between programming and music. If you've been in software for very long, you've probably noticed there's an odd overlap there, where there are a lot of people [chuckles] in software who do music.

I am Mike. I'm hosting today. And we've got a panel with us today. We've got Justin, Eddy, Kyle, Dom, Ramses. I know I do music. In fact, little known fact, I'm actually the one who recorded the music that we play in the intro for the podcast [laughs]. I'm somebody who enjoys music, and I have enjoyed music for many years. Actually, it was music that got me into software in the first place. I was originally going to go into a career in biology, molecular biology, genetics, work on plant genetics, and do that with my life. I kind of made a change in direction [laughs] way back when.

And what kind of got me going in that direction was that I loved music. I thought about going in that direction. And I thought, you know what? If I go into software, maybe I can apply that to some of the music stuff. And I remembered, hey, wait, I really love this [laughs]. I had done software when I was younger, and I remembered how much I enjoyed it, and I stuck with it, and it became my career.

Music has taken more of the backburner [laughs] in the years since. But if not for music, I probably would not have gone into software in the first place. I very much have a story with music. So, I'm going to ask each of our panelists here, Justin, do you make music?

JUSTIN: [laughs] I've been in the music scene, but I am a singer. I'm actually a member of a choir, about 100 people. We go on tour. Like, last year, we went to Ireland and England, and we sang in London in the St. Paul Cathedral. It was a really cool experience. And I have a performance here in a couple of weeks for Christmas, so lots of stuff there. My wife...you may hear a piano playing in the background here in a little bit because my wife teaches piano. Basically, every afternoon, there's, like, piano students shuffling in and out.

MIKE: So, that answer was yes.

JUSTIN: Yes [laughter]. It's a long answer. Sorry.

MIKE: Very much yes. Eddy, tell us about you and music.

EDDY: So, I actually used to be in a band in high school. We formulated a group called [SP] Guitarchestra. And it basically is what it sounds like, right? Every member in that group played guitar. We played different sections. You know, we played backup, and some people would play melodies. Some people would play the chord progressions, et cetera.

And it was an interesting approach because initially, when you think of a band, you would always think of, like, piano, and trumpets, and drums. And, you know, it was an interesting take at the time. We're talking about, like, 10-plus years ago, probably a little over where it was still kind of fresh to say, "Yeah, the whole band is comprised of just guitar." We even took it a bit further, and we decided to do purely acoustic. We determined that acoustic had a more pleasant sound with what we were going for. So, not to go too deeply into it unless we want to, but yes, to a degree, I do have some background in music.

MIKE: Again, that's not just a little bit of a yes, right? But a big yes [laughs]. Dom, actually, I have no idea if you do music [laughs].

DOM: I'll be the first short, yes. I was never super musically inclined as a kid. I guess the recorder is about as far as I ever went in, like, fifth grade. I could play pretty mean Hot Cross Buns, so I'm going to keep it real.

MIKE: [laughs]

DOM: But I'm an avid enjoyer to listening. I listen to music all day, every day, pretty much whatever. People always ask me like, "What's your music taste?" And, you know, it's super basic to be like, "I listen to everything." But you should check out my playlist. It goes from, like, hardcore gangster rap over to some, like, classic rock, maybe some country in there, throw in some Bach. It's pretty wild. But yeah, it's definitely a big part of my life, even though I can't play anything. I wish I could.

EDDY: Dom, you should listen to Ramses' playlist, man. You'd have a blast.

DOM: I bet. I'm open to whatever.

MIKE: And this thinking here it's not universal, right? Not everybody who does software development does music, but there's a lot. Kyle, what about you?

KYLE: I'm going to have to mimic Dom quite a bit, basically everything he said, for the most part. Anything that I really focused on music-wise was in high school and a little bit of college. I did a little bit of DJing, and then I had a big interest in car audio for the longest time. I've kind of grown out of that a little bit, but stereo systems were my thing.

EDDY: What's car audio?

KYLE: [laughs]. Yeah, dude, I've done a few car audio systems for replacing and wiring of the speakers and the head unit, subs, capacitors, amplifiers, all that jazz. You get the little amp for your speakers up front and a big amp for the big boys in the back, a couple of twelves, a couple of tens.

MIKE: So, what about you, Ramses?

RAMSES: I have a bit of experience with music and making music for the, like, last ten years or something, but it's been less two or three years, you know, a larger emphasis on development currently.

MIKE: But you're a creator. Just thinking about the sample size, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six people here. And of those six, the majority, not, like, 1% or 25%, but we've got, what, 4 out of 6 people who have played publicly, right? [laughs] Who have done music in their adult lives. I haven't looked at the statistics, but that seems disproportionate. And it's been that way.

DOM: Does karaoke count?

MIKE: [laughs]

DOM: I rock some mean karaoke.

MIKE: Well, you know, why not? I actually have a lot of thoughts about music. I think it's really unfortunate, actually, the way that music is often taught, particularly, like, classical performance, because we teach people to perform somebody else's music. Can you imagine if we taught writing that way? Like, okay, we're going to teach you to be a writer. And what you're going to do is you're going to take this essay over here, and you're going to copy it over here. And make sure you copy it exactly. Don't make any spelling mistakes. Any spelling mistakes means you're not a very good writer because good writing means that you're copying very well with this other essay.

You take that to its conclusion, and it's ridiculous. But it's very much how music is often taught, you know, you learn to play with other people. It's kind of neither here nor there. But [laughs] I do think that those of us who are in music should work very hard to be more inclusive. And when music is taught, I think that it should be taught with performance and improvisation in mind as much. You know, it's kind of an equal peer to reading music and learning to perform music.

In fact, when I teach my kids, that's exactly what I do [chuckles]. We divide the time in half, literally in half. They set a timer, and they spend half their time improvising and the other half learning to play because there is some value in learning. If you want to be a writer, you better be a good reader [laughs], and I think the same thing applies to music.

EDDY: When you teach your kids, do you teach them how to read notes or how to read tabs or, like, a mix of both? Like, how do you approach?

MIKE: Yeah, great question. They haven't been that interested in guitar. They have been interested in piano. My daughter has a little bit of interest in violin, and for that, she's just kind of played by ear a little bit, definitely no note reading for that. For the piano, I have taught them to read sight music to learn to read music notes. You don't play tab on the piano. But I have no objection to tab.

To give another take here, I think that tablature sometimes gets a little bit of scorn. It's like, well if you want to be a true musician, you have to be able to read traditional European notation. Well, traditional European notation wasn't always traditional, and I think it was created in the Renaissance era. And people had to create it then, and they invented it as just a useful technique to communicate with each other. And tablature was invented in the same way. It's just a notation technique. I have no objection to that. I think that we should actually lean into communicating well and use the notation that works best for the instrument we're playing. Oh, there's my take on it. What was your thoughts on that?

EDDY: Well, I initially...when I first picked up guitar, I taught myself mostly just because I was interested in the art of playing with strings in general. And I always enjoyed the sound. I thought it was always soothing and such. And so, I thought...as a kid, it's kind of hard to teach yourself how to read music, especially since internet was dial-up at the time. So, it was extremely hard, you know. Also, we shared a landline for internet, too.

MIKE: [laughs]

EDDY: So, we had to split, like, home phone and internet. It was another time. Regardless, the easiest approach for me was to download tablature for guitar, and it just made more sense. It was less of a curve, like, a steep curve, to learn because each note correlates to a placement in the guitar versus the note itself. So, I'm quite fond of it. But I do understand, like, it doesn't teach you very much technique as far as, like, if there's a half note versus a whole note.

MIKE: Well, I think that's actually a good tie back into our topic because we're talking about software development. So far, we've pretty much talked exclusively about music. And I'm going to ask a question here: Who do we write code for?

RAMSES: Humans mostly.

JUSTIN: [laughs] In general?

MIKE: I [inaudible 09:42] for a reason. Go ahead, Justin.

JUSTIN: I mean, basically, companies employ coders to write solutions for their business problems. And, you know, that can take a variety of different languages and such. But I think, you know, when you talk about it that way, oftentimes, you're writing code in exchange for dollars and gainful employment. I have a feeling you're talking a little bit deeper.

MIKE: Well, let's start here. So, you said paid us to solve problems. I think a lot of times we think that we're writing code for the computers, right? We're telling the computers what to do, and so we write code. But computers don't speak code. Computer processors have a set of inputs that take, you know, electronic, you know, signals. It's on or off. And we often think about that as zeros and ones. And in the early days of computing, they used the zeros and ones, either with switches or the punch cards; you know, they talked like a computer. And we don't do that anymore.

I got this idea, I think, from Dave who sometimes has hosted here. He says that we don't write code for computers, and I think he's right. We use languages that are written for humans, and then we run it through a compiler or an interpreter in order to convert it over to something that a computer can understand. We don't use notation that would be the most useful for computers. We use notation that will be most effective for us to understand. That is an important realization [laughs] as a coder. It means that getting it to work isn't really your goal. Getting something comprehensible so future you [laughs] or your co-workers, whoever it is, can come back and understand it.

We write code so that humans can comprehend it, not so computers can comprehend it. And music notation [chuckles], likewise, you know, there's different styles of music notation. That's not written so that we can listen to music. It's written to communicate to humans so they can experience music together. Once again, there's kind of this convergence that there's goals, thinking about the goals of what we're doing.

We write music because we enjoy that human experience. We're notating it. We're not doing that because we want to prove our awesomeness. That's not why [laughs] we do so but because we want to share our experience with somebody. And we talk about tablature versus other forms of music notation. There's trade-offs, absolutely. They're both means of communication, so we can have that shared experience, much as computer code is.

DOM: I just want to mention something you said a little bit earlier. But you said we're talking about different styles of notation for music. I've heard it word for word from somebody telling me about different languages that you can use the right tool for the job. It's like, why would you go out and build a whole application in some certain language when X language does a better job at doing that thing? That's kind of resonated with me, for sure.

MIKE: Interesting. Because when we're writing code, we're writing it for people, but there's this deep, technical aspect to it. You're telling the machine what to do, and you have to create the structure accurately, or else your code is wrong. But the end audience isn't the computer. Versus when we notate music, we have to get it technically accurate. That paper, you know, that we're writing on is not the end audience. It's the humans who will then go and have that experience.

EDDY: Is the equivalent of writing a blog in programming similar to music by playing the wrong note?

MIKE: That's interesting, Eddy. Is it playing the wrong note? Is it notating the wrong note? It probably depends on the performance because a lot of music is never notated, right? A lot of live music it's ephemeral [laughs]. There is no persistent notation that captures it. There may be a recording. And, absolutely, there are wrong notes and some styles of music; maybe that so-called wrong note ends up becoming part of the music, right?

RAMSES: That's jazz for you.

MIKE: [laughs] Exactly. And very deliberately gets worked in the music, and it depends on how jarring it is, and sometimes people choose to embrace it. Much as in our code, sometimes a bug becomes a feature, a happy accident. This act of creating a representation of our thinking has this huge overlap between creating music and writing code. I would argue that maybe that is some of why there seems to be so much overlap between musicians and coders.

Why do you all think, just given the sample set? Like, I think it's pretty random sampling [laughs]. We have a lot of people who are avid musicians as well as coders, a majority. Why do you all think that there's overlap between people who code and people who write music or make music?

EDDY: Kind of funny how, on one field, copying and pasting isn't plagiarism but rather a common occurrence. And on the other side of the [inaudible 14:29], copying and pasting can get you in trouble. So, there is an interesting dichotomy.

MIKE: Well, that's interesting because it can get you in trouble if you wholesale lift it completely. When you copy somebody's style, you're totally fine, right? In fact, it's expected, and we've got genres that people seek out because they have a similar style. And there's a gray area as to how much of that borrowing is okay.

Bob Dylan wrote a number of years ago...I believe it's called Love and Theft. And in that, without telling anybody, he heavily borrowed his lyrics from, like, a 19th-century poet. And right in the title, he mentions theft and then didn't tell anybody. I remember it caused a bit of a stir when people noticed it.

I think people mostly got over it, and they realized that he's probably doing it on purpose, this big easter egg for people to go in there and find. He's kind of exploring the boundary, what counts as plagiarism because musicians borrow from each other all of the time. And particularly in the folk tradition, they quote pretty much verbatim from other singers. They maybe add their own tweaks to it. And that's how we got a lot of our musical heritage.

JUSTIN: All of the AI compositioning that is going on right now, you look at it, it's trained with existing corpus of music all across, you know, the world, you know. It can certainly use anything older than the copyright period, you know, as part of the training, and it can get a lot of the open-source stuff right now, and all that's completely legal. And so, you got to ask yourself, hey, is it real, or is it just what we do anyway?

EDDY: There have been, like, lawsuits, and court hearings about ownership of music and, like, the way music is written. And I think we've pretty much determined that, like, you cannot own notes [chuckles] and chords, right? Like, that's just not possible. But maybe the way the sequence of those notes, you know, can. And I think to some degree, development, you know, and coding is applicable. If you copy and paste something from Stack Overflow, that's okay, right? Because it's free. Everyone can get it; not a big deal. But if you get your hands on, like, the codebase, you know, of a company, then suddenly, that's plagiarism.

MIKE: And those boundaries aren't as rigid as we might hope, or maybe it's nice that they're not so rigid. We've got social convention that drives that. It's not inevitable that we have copyright law be what it is today [chuckles]. It's just simply not, either for software, for music.

And there's been a, you know, proprietary software was kind of king for a long time. And the open-source movement has changed that where a lot of our most fundamental tools like our operating systems, you know, Linux, which runs Android, which runs most of the servers out there [chuckles] is open source. But there's still a lot of proprietary software out there. They live side by side often and maybe, usually, side by side in the same companies, you know, kind of filling different roles.

And copyright law (I don't know for music.), you know, it's also gone through different directions. I don't want to get into a debate over copyright law [laughs], but it's a complicated area. And those social conventions can change over time. Have you all thought some about open-source music? I actually have thought a lot about this. But is this something that any of you have thought at length about?

JUSTIN: Yeah, what we're doing today, we're programming music. We can open source it, versus, you know, I think a lot of...there's a lot of copyright-free (I'm doing little air quotes.) copyright-free on YouTube and other platforms that you can use for whatever. And so, it's like, you know, is this code that we're going to go code, are we going to open source it, or are we going to just say it's ours? You know, it's all these things that we got to decide.

MIKE: To make those decisions [chuckles], you start getting into all this ethics. And sometimes you think, oh, I'm just [inaudible 18:32] coder. I don't want to think about that. Or I'm just a musician; I don't have to think about that. But it suffuses kind of everything we do. And it's inescapable that you have to make some of these decisions. And it's not necessarily very clear. And the people who say that they have all of the answers are probably leaving a lot out.

For example, we all love to get music and to listen to music, and we all kind of wish that it was all free. It seems really problematic to have a lot of our shared cultural heritage locked up and for the purpose of making some corporation money somewhere. I think that all kind of makes us a little queasy.

But on the flip side, how do the artists get paid if not by putting some restrictions on their work? So, that artificially limiting copying, which is essentially free nowadays, artificially limiting that and forcing people to pay for it. And I'm [inaudible 19:19] to have the answers. Much like the debate in the open-source community versus closed source, there are some questions that have a lively debate, and I think can and should continue to have a lively debate because there are multiple parties involved, and they have different needs. But we've talked a lot about some of the overlap. Anybody else have any other thoughts about why musicians and developers often overlap?

KYLE: One thing that I was thinking about as you guys were talking about, like, chords and written music, is it makes me wonder because, like I said, I've not really done a lot of music myself, but I've known people, dual majors in, like, Spanish and English lit or, you know, that know multiple languages. They tend to also like to know multiple programming languages. And how much is music, you know, is it just another language? Is it just something else to learn, some other way of communicating that people just tend to enjoy?

MIKE: The people love to communicate, and good communicators make good coders.

KYLE: Yeah, it's one of those that, you know, you're drawn to more of those universal languages, right? At least in my experience, you know, the more popular languages they are popular for a reason, you know, say what you will about, like, Java and stuff, but it's a popular language. I mean, that's cross-regional. And how often is music cross-regional? I mean, everybody can listen to music. You don't have to understand the language that it's sung in or, you know, I mean, even if it's vocal, I mean, you don't have to understand the language to enjoy it.

EDDY: And just like a software app, you don't necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of, like, how it's architected behind the scenes to enjoy the app, right? Much like merchant portal.

MIKE: We build software, yeah. And you don't see much of it behind the scenes, but you get to use it as a utility. I don't know if we always think about the utility of music. It has social utility. It brings us together as people. It lets us share emotions with each other. We find it useful, if only for our enjoyment.

Let's take this a little bit further. As Justin alluded to, there are tools out there that crosses boundary between software and music. I have a couple of tools that I had in mind, and we're going to try one out here in a minute. The first one that came to my mind was LilyPond. Has anybody else here used LilyPond before? Ooh, LilyPond is awesome [laughs].

It's an open-source tool, and it's written in Scheme, I believe, you know, a Lisp variant, which is very good for recursion and thinking about nested things, yeah, LilyPond. It's a fantastic tool for notating music. It does support tablature, by the way. So, if you want to notate music, I'd recommend to anybody LilyPond, particularly if you're a developer. I've shared it with some people who weren't developers, and they're like, "Huh, I don't know."

[laughter]

JUSTIN: We use MuseScore a lot. You are probably familiar with that already. It looks like it's very similar to LilyPond. But it's nice, and the fact that you can, I mean, it integrates well with a mini keyboard and things like that.

MIKE: The thing about LilyPond, like, the default mode is you write code. It has its own, you know, little domain-specific language where you write note names and durations. And you can nest them in staves, and, you know, it's built up around music notation. If you ever want to...I've used it quite a bit over the years, and I've really enjoyed it. So, there's one thing that I've used. But there are other ways of expressing music. What tools have you all used that cross the boundary between coding and music creation?

DOM: I mean, there's GarageBand. I don't know how much coding you can get into in GarageBand. I never dove into that aspect of it. It's always just been, like, different layers of recording and things.

EDDY: Has anyone heard of Guitar Hero?

RAMSES: Oh yeah.

EDDY: Okay. So, there's a huge community out there. It's still active today, right? Where we found out that we didn't want to be restricted to only the songs that they've licensed for the game, right? So, we, as a community, did an open-source project called Clone Hero. And essentially, you can modify the game and develop the charts yourself in order to compose the music to correlate with the sound, right?

And suddenly, it became huge, and everyone became invested into this open-source project that I think is amazing. So, that's the closest I've ever had as an overlap, I would say, where you see the passion of a project, right? And suddenly, you [inaudible 24:00] other tasks, like, be confined, you know, into some sort of project in order to do it. So...

MIKE: Well, that's totally legit [laughs]. That's absolutely the same kind of thing. What kind of notation is used for those charts?

EDDY: It's just circles, like, colored circles coming down on a highway chart where you have --

MIKE: Got it. [crosstalk 24:20] build those. How do you build those? Because I'm assuming you don't take a crayon and [laughs]...have you built any of these yourself?

EDDY: I have, yeah. I have actually posed a couple of those.

MIKE: What sort of format do you...again, because I'm assuming you're not using a crayon. What do you use to find what those circles are going to be?

EDDY: That's kind of interesting. They may have modified it since, right? But it's software that you have to download. You essentially choreograph the placement of the note manually, and you get a timeline, essentially, of the audio and you [inaudible 25:01] matching.

MIKE: Got it.

EDDY: Definitely no crayons.

MIKE: [laughs] No crayons. But at some point, it's a representation of time, right?

EDDY: Yes.

MIKE: Of time distribution and pitch over, you know, what frets [laughs] you're going to be playing on and duration, which is a kind of encoding, which is what we've been talking about all along.

So, there's this cool project; it's called Sonic Pi. It's been around for years. It's actually been, like, this labor of love for a long time. Boy, I probably first used this, I have to think about this, 7-10 years ago [laughs]. So, this has been a project that has been around for a long time. And it's free. You can download it. I think it's community-supported. You can probably donate money. Shout out here if, you know, maybe give some money to the developers in this project. And it's often used for education. And it's just a tool where you get to do live music creation.

My understanding is that there are DJs who use this for their shows, so it's not just an educational tool. It can actually be used for music generation in real-world settings. And the scripting language that you use inside of it is Ruby. We're mostly Rubyists here, certainly not exclusively, but there's a lot of Rubyists here. We will brush against Ruby now and again, at least [laughs], and Sonic Pi lets you do that.

One thing about a podcast is you can't show the visuals. As we're recording this, we're looking at each other's faces. But we just extract the audio stream and push that up. So, we can't really show you what we're doing. But there's...I'll give you an idea of what's going on. Sonic Pi is this tool that lets you just start writing [laughs], and it says, "There are no mistakes. There are only interesting accidents [laughs]." It's kind of what we said before. There's not exactly bugs. There's things that might not suit your inclination, so you change it.

I have a relatively new laptop. I didn't have a recent copy of Sonic Pi. I downloaded it, like, 10 minutes before we started our podcast recording. And I just went through the tutorial they've got and threw together some stuff, you know, in a few minutes and put in some loops. So, let me play what I did [chuckles]. There's no claim to greatness in music. But I just want you to see what kind of things you can do in 10 minutes in a tool like this.

[playing music]

So, I did a few things here. I just did a loop, and this is straight out of the demo. This is just the bass drum [chuckles]. Looped that eight times. Sixteen times, I do another loop where I play some other sounds, including the drum. And then I end with a kind of a trailing sound at the end.

What we should do is we should play around with this a little bit. And this is pretty much just from the tutorial. I changed a couple of different sample names, but this is out-of-the-box behavior [laughs]. No brilliance from Mike. And it sounds like music, just with that little bit of time. And I thought, you know, I haven't even tried this. I was going to see what happens if I threw an offset and bass drum in there with a slightly different rate. And I don't even know what's going to happen. Do we see?

[playing music]

There you go. It's different.

EDDY: Mike, I'm curious: can you use methods?

MIKE: Absolutely.

EDDY: Interesting.

MIKE: So, that is interesting. Should we write one?

EDDY: Yes, let's.

MIKE: Let's see what happens if we replace our bass drum here with a method.

[playing music]

There we go. Methods work great.

EDDY: Can we do loops?

MIKE: We can, and you may have noticed that it's already doing loops. And, additionally, and I may comment this out, it allows live loops. Let's try it. We press the run button. And we can stop it. Although with it still running, we should be able to change this.

RAMSES: Does the live loop just allow you to modify the code while it's running? Is that the idea?

MIKE: That's the idea. We're going to do our bass drum again. This is straight from the demo. [playing music]. So, what if we want to change the rate of our drum? So, let's see. [playing music] No change there. [playing music] There we go. I kept the duration of the sounds that's getting clipped. [playing music] Okay. What would you have me change? Do you want me to change the tempo?

DOM: I like the total tempo right now. I think adding some complementary snares will really help the composition of our piece.

MIKE: Let's do it. [playing music] So, I would say that that kind of overrode the bass drum a little bit. What if we change that a little bit? So, I'm going to add in a snare [playing music]. It works.

EDDY: Can we add a cymbal?

MIKE: Yeah, let's do it. Let's think about how we would do this. So, first thing, we've got our bass drum, right? It pauses an eighth note and then plays our snare. And then it's going to pause for a half note minus an eighth note. So, I think what we want to do here is...let's think about it. Do we want it exactly on the same positions as our bass drum? And then we sleep for an eighth note. We play our snare drum, right? And then, let's sleep for another eighth note. That will get us to our quarter, play our cymbal again. So, I don't think I've quite got this worked out to full quarter notes yet, but we've got a little bit. Let's what we've got. First take. [playing music] There we go.

EDDY: That's really cool.

MIKE: Yeah, and then we can start adding in more sounds, right? We can start adding in stuff right in the background. Let's add in ambient dark whoosh.

[playing music]

You get some rhythm in there.

[playing music]

Cool. And we wrote some code, and we made some music.

EDDY: I actually [inaudible 32:13] kind of interesting. I went ahead and shared external examples of people who have actively developed [inaudible 32:20] some code. I thought it would be interesting to kind of hear some examples of what you can accomplish with people who have taken presumably hours trying to get the right sequence.

MIKE: Okay, cool. So, we can try one of these examples. Let's give it a try, shall we? [playing music] Nice. Writing music using code. So, we've had some fun [laughs]. We started by talking about some of that overlap between the musicians and coders, some of our background [laughs], and then put it to work, you know, talking about some of these tools.

I'm going to go back to something I said a little bit before about creation. This is all fun. And [chuckles] you might think, oh, it's just fun. Well, I am not going to do that. Well, something that I found in software development, and this has come up before in our podcast, and it's going to come up over and over again, is that communication is vital for successful software development. It's come up in this session [chuckles]. Communication is so central to what we do. We're communicating with a computer, communicating with each other. Much of what we do is maybe...almost everything what we do involves communication.

Playing around with something like this might not seem very important, but developing shared communication together is one of the most important things that we can accomplish together as a team. You know [laughs], I'd invite anybody who listens to this to...it's maybe a little silly [chuckles] but, you know, to go spend a little time and play around with it but not alone. Here's my invitation, that you go and do it with somebody like we just did. The music that we've made together, I think, was a lot better than we would have gotten alone.

Any parting words that any of you would like to add before we end our session today?

DOM: Make sure to be on the lookout for the new Acima underground album featuring...

MIKE: [laughs]

DOM: Dirty Mike and the Boys. It's our new hit single. It's going to be awesome.

MIKE: [laughs] Thanks for the shout-out, Dom. Be on the listen for a future podcast session.

EDDY: [laughs]

MIKE: Great. Thanks again for listening to us on the Acima Development podcast. Until next time.