Daniel Russell

Returning to the world of C++ after around two decades of exploring other areas, I now develop software with gaming-like interfaces. In particular, I am working on a music composition and audio production application that plays like a game while using advanced visualization techniques and AI to help musicians compose music.Previous software options have been very weak at delivering a smooth and intuitive experience to users. With the advent of AI, VR, and AR, we have the opportunity to revolutionize how we educate ourselves and how we get work done. I am currently investing in these future technologies by developing software that will integrate them to make music composition, sound design and production accessible to anyone with a musical mind--which is probably most human beings who try, really.Music notation is often confused with "Music Theory," but the truth is, our current standard musical notation system is difficult for learners. Most people who want to write a song immediately slam into a very big barrier to entry and give up, losing their inspiration in the process.One solution is to ditch the old notation system, like most modern DAWs. They focus on Piano Roll view, after early attempts to offer a more traditional notation view were poorly implemented and never improved. That makes DAWs distasteful to most musicians for composing, especially because their notation rendering is awful.These old views of our musical work are just ok at best. The Piano Roll is intuitive to start using, but quickly starts to feel limited and unmusical, in a sense. It's hard to see the harmonic patterns in either view. In fact, a LOT of things are hard to see.My software provides enhanced versions of both Piano Roll and traditional notation, but takes both to a whole new level. Many more views are provided as well, each designed to help you focus on different aspects of production. Views include all sorts of additional information presented in a sci-fi GUI, to help you learn what notation means. They also show you how your music is changing in harmonic tension, how melodies are connected, how physics generates rhythm, and so on, all to leverage your inborn instincts.The software uses Vulkan to access GPU cores for all its rendering, and the renderer is blazingly fast to keep latencies to a minimum. GPU code is also employed to calculate audio spatialization. It is being written in C++17/20 and uses metaprogramming heavily to optimize runtimes.