The sonic sweeps and that breathy melody interplay beautifully together. I love how you panned the sounds back and forth, it really gives the sense of being surrounded by the sound.

I realize this was posted several years ago, but what's the purpose of programming music in this manner? Is it just a mental exercise?

Thanks for the compliments. Well, it's sort of two things: In this case, it's teaching people to program using music, since it's a nice way to good feedback on what you're doing. There are similar courses, one called Scratch, which teaches learning to program via moving sprites across the screen, and another one, moving objects in blocks, that's suitable for young children to learn. So in this case, it's teaching the fundamentals of programming via creating songs. I took the course just to make music using the program, as I am interested in software synthesis.

The second part, is, there seems to be a community of composers who use the computer/algorithms to generate music, and a fair amount of it is within the academic community. There's a complex program called CSound that can do this, although when I heard some compositions, it doesn't really sound musical at all, but more experimental, almost like noise from space. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIoM-eFGXeI (this one is actually pretty cool). And here's an example of the weird stuff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_p.....rj-cruYgdBngt4) good for spacing out I guess!

I guess what I find interesting is, it can allow you to create something of your own, that current soft-synths can't do. Now this particular language (not complex enough) couldn't do that, but you could generate audio yourself).