After seeing from gnat that there are over 500 (!) proposals in for presentations this year, I'm not particularly optimisitc about a music one getting in. Web services, p2p, etc. should probably be ahead of me in the queue; there ain't any venture capital in ambient music.
I'm going ahead on it anyway, simply because the music software available for Linux simultaneously is unbelievably brilliant and sucks really hard at the same time.
All of the packages mentioned above are the musical equivalent of assembly language or barely above. csound thinks of everything as a scalar. You can create pseudo-arrays with "generator" functions, but these have to be referred to by number, as do files (no, not filehandles, numbers, just like in Fortran). cmix does a little better, with a c-like language called Minc (Minc is not C); cmusic uses full C syntax, but requires the edit/compile/run/swear/repeat cycle. And there's no gloabl way to talk about a musical phrase or manipulate it in the program - everything's:
"Here's a note on this instrument, starting at this time, and going this long. Now here's another one. And another. And another. Now let's write a loop which generates something else, one note at a time."I feel like one of those guys in the mall, spending his days painting people's names on a grain of rice.
As moral support let me say that if I had been in the "reading committee" this year I would have probably voted your proposal high (of course, only it has been also of technically high quality: typos and boring technology will bring down even an interesting topic).
My criterion is simple, really: if a talk makes me sit up and lean forward, that is, if it is interesting, it is good. Different is interesting. Honestly, who the fuck wants to hear about yet another web application du jour, be it a content management system, ticketing system, blogging system, whatever, or the fav hype of the hour, web services. I don't know about you people but I get to do and listen and suffer that all day long at work-- having to listen to the same crap at a conference would be extremely painful. Even if the software would be beautifully designed, implemented, or just look cool, if it's common, its booooring.
My leaning was pretty obvious (I hope) in previous years: I went for the wacky, for the off-mainstream. Maybe that's not what people want to hear and that's why I got censored off the committee this year, maybe it's all a conspiracy
