Building With Sound
How I think about music production as software engineering, and why the two have more in common than I expected.
I started making music in 2023. What surprised me most wasn’t how different the two disciplines were — it was how similar.
The DAW as IDE
A digital audio workstation is basically a specialized IDE for sound. There are projects, dependencies (samples, plugins), build processes (rendering), version control headaches (audio files are huge and binary), and the same temptation to spend all day configuring your tools instead of making things.
The analogy breaks down eventually — music has an immediacy that code doesn’t. A chord is either satisfying or it isn’t, and you know in the moment. A bug might not surface for weeks. But the workflow, the way you move between making and evaluating and making again — it’s identical.
Constraints as a creative tool
I’ve been making music in a deliberately constrained setup for the last year. One synthesizer, one drum machine, lots of samples. The goal was to develop a voice, something that sounds like me and shines through no matter the tool.
The same thing works in code. When you constrain yourself to the standard library, or to no external dependencies, or to a single file; something happens. You stop reaching for the convenient solution and start solving the actual problem. The constraint creates the shape.
The best software I’ve written was under constraint. The best music I’ve made was also under constraint.
Deadlines are finishing forces
Most of my ideas ended in what i like to call “The Closet”. That is, generously, a graveyard. Tracks that were almost there. Features that got stranded between design and implementation. Ideas that needed one more thing.
The tracks I’ve finished — actually exported, actually shared — came from sessions where I set a timer and shipped what I had when it went off. The features I’ve shipped without scope creep came from similar discipline.
Finishing things is a skill. It’s separate from the skill of making things, and it matters more.
The loop
Here’s what I’ve noticed: making music makes me better at coding. Not in any mystical way — it’s just that music forces you to listen to yourself, to evaluate output against intention, to be willing to throw away work that doesn’t serve the piece.
Coding, in turn, has given me a patience for iteration and debugging that I didn’t have when I started. A track that isn’t working is just a bug that needs finding.
Both of these things require sitting with something that isn’t right yet and trusting the process of getting it there.
That’s the part I’m still learning.