Over the past few years, I've been prototyping PAW, a DAW based on ideas from live coding and bidirectional programming. Like with live coding, in PAW you write code to describe a piece of music incrementally. As part of this, you also build a GUI for direct manipulation of that same code, providing similar affordances to traditional DAWs.

PAW stems from my observations that regular DAWs tend to be limited in what they let users do, due to fundamental limitations with traditional GUIs. I believe that mixing in ideas from live coding, and programming at large, can help savvy users shed those limitations, while retaining familiar GUI affordances and usability.

The software is open source, but not yet quite usable. My goal with this talk is to share ideas with other people in the field of music production software.