Comment by anonymous908213

Just to provide a little more context, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is, underneath all of the complexity and advanced features piled on top, a program which provides a visual timeline and a way to place notes on the timeline. The timeline is almost directly analogous to sheet music, except instead of displaying notes in a bespoke artificial language like sheet music does, they are displayed as boxes on the timeline, with the length of the box directly correlating to how long the note plays. Placing and dragging these boxes around makes up the foundation of working in a DAW, and every decision to place a box is a decision that shapes the resulting music.

Where to place boxes to make good music is not obvious, and typically takes a tremendous understanding of music theory, prior art, and experimentation. I think the comparison to an author or programmer "just pressing keys" is apt. Reducing it to the most basic physical representation undercuts all of the knowledge and creativity involved in the work. While it can be tedious sometimes, if you've thought of a structure that sounds good but there is a lot of repetition involved in notating it, there are a lot of software features to reduce the tedious aspects. A DAW is not unlike an IDE, and there are ways to package and automate repetitive musical structures and tasks and make them easy to re-use, just as programmers have tools to create structures that reduce the repetitive parts of writing code so they can spend more of their attention on the creative parts.