So, Is This Research? I Think Not.

Every so often a category problem appears around Ooloi.

If this is not a product blog, what is it? If it refuses the usual commercial language, is it research? If it's full of architectural detail, references to old engraving books, implementation notes, screenshots, AI, undo, Wagner tubas, and the occasional indecorous joke, what sort of thing is the reader supposed to be looking at?

A fair question, and a revealing one.

The short answer is no. This is not research.

It's also not a product blog in the ordinary sense, which may be the first difficulty, because almost every software blog now behaves like a shop window. Some are tasteful shop windows, some are vulgar ones, some are dressed up as engineering diaries, but the function is the same. Reassure the prospective customer. Show momentum. Convert attention into confidence. Keep the voice steady. Make every feature sound like a benefit. Don't frighten the horses.

Hence the language:

• 'We're delighted to announce…'
• 'Our users asked, so we listened…'
• 'Seamless workflows…'
• 'Unlock your creativity…'
• 'Built to empower today's creators…'

Not here.

This blog will never say 'we're delighted to announce', partly because there's no 'we' in that sense, partly because delight is not the usual emotion when a difficult subsystem finally works (relief is closer, occasionally suspicion), and partly because the phrase belongs to a kind of speech that falsifies the relation between builder, work, and reader. It isn't only ugly. It's structurally dishonest.

The Ooloi blog is not entertainment for prospective customers. It isn't written to keep readers engaged. It's not a funnel, a campaign, a launch surface, or a series of carefully portioned confidence pellets. If five consecutive posts need to be about undo, Ross, collaboration state, platform policy, and the historical notation of Wagner tubas, then that's what the blog will contain. The work determines the record, not the imagined patience of a marketing segment.

That does make the blog unusual, and harder to read for anyone trained by product communication to expect a certain grammar: progress as reassurance, difficulty as opportunity, compromise as wisdom, and every strange technical decision translated into customer benefit before it's allowed to appear in public.

Ooloi doesn't do that. It says what happened, why it mattered, what broke, what changed order, what turned out harder than expected, and what the architecture now makes possible. The development log keeps the same discipline in another form: completion dates, settled facts, architectural invariants, and the sequence by which the work revealed its own logic. No chest-beating, but no false modesty either.

So if it isn't commercial speech, is it research?

No.

That's the other trap. A good many people seem to keep two authorised categories for serious technical work. Either it's commercial, in which case it must sell, or it's academic, in which case it must situate itself inside the apparatus: question, method, literature, contribution, limitations, future work.

Academic writing has its virtues, and I've no interest in pretending otherwise. But Ooloi would be falsified if forced into that register. The project isn't asking a research question about music notation software. It's building music notation software. It isn't proposing a framework for later validation; it's making architectural decisions and testing whether they hold. It isn't waiting for a grant body, a conference committee, or a peer-review cycle to decide whether collaboration belongs in the core model, whether immutable state changes the economics of undo, or whether Ross's engraving geometry should become data.

The academic form carries its own performative restrictions. They differ from the commercial ones, but performative restrictions they remain. Commercial language flatters and reassures; academic language credentials and delimits. The first turns decisions into benefits, the second turns them into contributions. Both can obscure the living act of building.

Ooloi sits elsewhere.

That elsewhere isn't hobbyism. The work is far too systematic for the word to be useful: ADRs, guides, tests, transport, undo, validation, documentation, platform policy, and a public development record intended to survive me. But it isn't institutional research either, because it doesn't ask institutional permission to be serious.

It's a serious system being built in public, by someone who can still say 'fuck' when 'fuck' is the correct unit of meaning.

Which brings us to register.

One of the quieter disasters of professional speech is the belief that seriousness requires narrowing the permitted range of language. Commercial writing wants bright smoothness. Academic writing wants sanctioned abstraction. Neither is much good at admitting that a human mind can move from the ontological to the obscene without changing subject.

Ingmar Bergman understood this perfectly. His language could span six-syllable philosophical terms and four-letter words, sometimes in the same sentence, not as decoration and not as shock, but because that's how consciousness actually works when it's allowed its full range.

Bergman was well-known for saying things like:

'– Och sen känner du, sirru, den här frätande existensångesten i hela fittan.'

The power of it isn't that a vulgar word has been parked next to a philosophical one for comic effect. The power is that existensångesten (existential dread) isn't left floating in the head where such words usually stay. It enters the body, and not some polite symbolic body either. The sentence is philosophical, comic, obscene, bodily, and exact, all at once, and entirely alive.

No register barred.

That's also how I think about this blog. Not because Ooloi is Bergman, and not because a notation program grows more profound if you occasionally swear in its vicinity. The point is simpler. A project of this kind is made by a whole person, not by a corporate function and not by an academic persona. The same mind that worries about beam rotation also remembers Ross arriving in a padded envelope from Melbourne. The same project that needs deterministic accidental rendering also needs an interface quiet enough to stay out of the way. The same life that writes about STM and gRPC also holds grief, irritation, gratitude, AI, orchestration, old books, platform decisions, technical solitude, and the occasional dick joke.

The mixture isn't a lapse in discipline. It's a refusal to amputate parts of the speaker in order to satisfy a prefabricated register.

This matters because Ooloi itself doesn't separate cleanly into the compartments people expect. It's a notation program, a continuation of Igor's semantic line, a Clojure application, a collaboration system, an engraving project, a playback ambition, a documentation corpus, a reckoning with old software architecture, and a long attempt to build something that stays legible without its author standing beside it. Any blog pretending this could be reduced to 'new feature: collaboration' would be lying by omission.

Nor would the academic version fare much better. 'This post situates Ooloi within contemporary research on collaborative music notation systems and proposes a semantic architecture for distributed score editing.' You could write that sentence. You could then spend six pages making it respectable. The result would be less truthful than simply saying: collaboration belongs in the architecture from the beginning, single-user mode is a collaboration group of one, and undo becomes a different ethical problem once other people have witnessed the timeline.

That's not because rigour is unwelcome. It's because rigour and academic posture aren't the same thing.

The audience for this blog is small, and I'm entirely happy with that. At the moment it has somewhere around five hundred unique visitors a month, and they read more than one page. Enough. More than enough, in fact, because it means the right people are finding it without the blog needing to flatten itself for reach.

There's a freedom in that. After a working life spent around commercial development and the short-sighted nonsense it generates, much of it performed for egotistical extractors wearing the language of care, it's an extraordinary luxury to write exactly what the work requires. A dense technical article one week. A nerdy engraving reflection the next. A post about grief, if grief is what happened. A collaboration UI note that stops just before the proof, because the proof belongs in the next post. A joke, if the joke is alive.

The commercial reader may wonder where the product messaging is.

The academic reader may wonder where the research framing is.

In both cases the answer is the same: they're looking for the wrong kind of permission.

Ooloi.org isn't a shop window. It isn't a paper. It isn't an application for legitimacy. It's the public trace of a system being built with the registers left open.

So the blog will carry on as it has to: technical when the work is technical, nerdy when the work is nerdy, personal when the work is personal, blunt when bluntness is exact, and quiet when quiet is exact.

No apology is coming.