Python, Inside JavaScript, Inside a DAW

For about fifteen years, my answer to a music theory question had the same shape: open another window. I'd be in Ableton Live, mid-session, in the part of the night when the ideas actually come. A clip would be sitting there with four chords in it and I wouldn't know what the last one was called, or what should come next, or why the thing I'd stumbled onto sounded right. So I'd leave. Alt-tab to a browser, a PDF, a chord-namer site, a half-remembered diagram on someone's blog. Later, once I'd built PyTheory, I'd alt-tab to a terminal and type the notes in by hand. The answer was always one window away, which is to say it was always in a different room than the music. That gap is small, and it is also the whole problem. The questions worth asking arrive in flow, and flow is exactly the state that leaving the session destroys. By the time you've found the answer in the other window, you've forgotten why you wanted it. The theory was never hard to look up. It was hard to look up without…