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What sort of music are you interested in? Are you talking about sound production, performing, composing?

The main difference with composing is that you are usually writing a program for a real person to perform, not for a computer to execute. This means that writing music is less exacting, but can also be more subtle.

The other big difference is that you aren't usually writing music to solve an external problem. With music, you have to invent the problems you want to solve. You might say "I want to hold an F# in the alto line for 4 measures, while moving all the other voices in a chord progression that adheres to the following restrictions..." You just make up the conditions on your own. Software, in contrast, almost always solves a concrete, defineable problem (even if you don't know what that problem will be when you start coding).

With performing, the biggest difference is that it's real-time action and communication. You have to train physically in order to be good, and learning bad habits is disastrous. Code-reading and being good at using an editor are more analogous to music performance than software development in general. With writing code, it can be a good thing to write 1,000 lines of crap, if you learn enough not to make those mistakes again. Making mistakes while performing just leads to more mistakes in the future.




If I could create a good piece of music (recording), I would be happy. Being able to perform it would be a plus, but not so important.

I tend to think more in terms of emotions I would like to express, but maybe that is insufficient.




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