[redrobein]

Interesting problem to think about. The beauty of modular for me has always been that you can take voltage from literally anywhere and use it for CV. Modern modules also have an insane variety in controls and control surfaces, even for standard things like VCOs you have a ton of variety and featuresets. Saving the patch state is one thing but actually notating is crazy. Like I can't imagine someone being able to read this notation and play it accurately like someone sight reading a piano piece. You'd surely require familiarity with the setup ahead of time. As for recording it for posterity, being verbose and describing what you're doing in full works, I guess.

[bandrami]

Didn't pd basically borrow spice's circuit layout language for the way it textually stores patches? I know it exists and it's so brittle that nobody ever, ever, edits it, but maybe there's a way to make it a little more resilient and editable?

[plussed_reader]

PD is the non commercial end of Miller Puckettes(and others) contributions to Max/MSP, but with soooo much more.

[bandrami]

This is true, but doesn't really get to the question of how it serializes modular synthesizers

[HelloNurse]

A textual notation for rich and generic graphs can only become more "resilient and editable" by giving nice names to entities and by keeping documents small and hierarchical.

[bandrami]

Not true at all; parsing matters. Json and yaml (and s-expressions and...) are equivalent but yaml having significant whitespace makes it mangleable in a way that the others aren't.