Variable for Rest

Questions
3

This has come up often enough that I’m willing (after the dust settles from a few things at work) to make this my first RFC.

See this thread:

https://scsynth.org/t/pbind-and-samples-with-different-durations-2

IMO something like Pattern.rest or Pattern.asRest should exist, but there is no consensus on that. You could also take James’ suggestion Prest from there.

chuckle I just reread that thread… I don’t have a lot to add to it, and tbh, my opinion hasn’t changed very much.

  • In pattern-land, the baseline way to modify patterns’ results is a filter pattern: Pfin, Pcollect etc.

  • EDIT deleted one point because it wasn’t true.

  • I’d also argue that reading the code out loud doesn’t work very well for a rest method. pattern.collect(func) reads as “I have these values, and I want this operation to be done for them.” pattern.rest reads as “I have these values, and… oh, by the way, I want them to be rests.” The latter strikes me as awkward, where the former does not.

  • Last, I now think Prest should have a count argument (like Pfin) instead of a probability, default = 1. It seems to me that the typical case is to interlace a single rest in the middle of some other sequence. (Unless you’re John Cage, you never want an infinite stream of rests.) Tendency masking should be done by another class.

hjh