Every generation of musicians for the past 8 decades has had the same thoughts. What live coding tools for synthesis offers you is an understanding of the nature of generational technology.
Consider this: there are teenagers today, out there somewhere, learning to code music. Remember when synthesisers were young and cool and there was an explosion of different engines and implementations?
This is happening for the kids, again.
Try to use this new technology to replicate the modern, and then the old sound, and then discover new sounds. Like we synth nerds have been doing for decades.
Music coding technology has been around a long time - think of tools like csound and pd and Max/MSP. They're great for coding synthesizers. Nobody uses them to do songs. Even Strudel has tools for basic GUI components because once you get past the novelty of 'this line of code is modulating the filter wowow' typing in numeric values for frequency or note duration is the least efficient way to interact with the machine.
Pro developers who really care about the sound variously write in C/C++ or use cross compilers for pd or Max. High quality oscillators, filters, reverb etc are hard work, although you can certainly get very good results with basic ones given today's fast processors.
Live coding is better for conditionals like 'every time [note] is played increment [counter], when [counter] > 15 reset [counter] to 0 and trigger [something else]'. But people who are focused on the result rather than the live coding performance tend to either make their own custom tooling (Autechre) or programmable Eurorack modules that integrate into a larger setup, eg https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/the-programmable-euror...
It's not that you can't get great musical results via coding, of course you can. But coding as performance is a celebration of the repl, not of the music per se.
It was said of synthesizers in the early days: “its not ‘real’ music” and its going to be said of every new music technology tool forever, because whenever someone invents a new way of making music, there will be detractors. This is a natural phenomenon of the subject and always will be.
I like your idea of celebrating the repl, its right up there with performance menu diving as a statement for how orthogonal things can get .. I’ve never enjoyed fishing for parameters, so having editor chops applied musically is .. refreshing .. in some strange ways.
Sure wish hardware manufactures would be motivated to not just throw a linked list and a couple of buttons at the parameter issue ..
JMJ happened in the middle of the synth era, not the beginning of it, and his rise to fame definitely heralded a new acceptance of synthesisers as instruments, its true, but there were dark days in the beginning when synths were not considered cool, one bit, and regarded as not real instruments because they were artificially attempting to recreate other instruments .. in the early days.
(Disclaimer: I've been in the MI business for decades, I've seen some things..)
Consider this: there are teenagers today, out there somewhere, learning to code music. Remember when synthesisers were young and cool and there was an explosion of different engines and implementations?
This is happening for the kids, again.
Try to use this new technology to replicate the modern, and then the old sound, and then discover new sounds. Like we synth nerds have been doing for decades.