This does seem a bit of an exaggeration to me (pace the fact I have been
contributing to the oblique posts myself!) - I see plenty of detailed Csound
posts in the current crop. I also don't think its entirely fair to say 'it has
nothing to do with Csound', because the posts are not typically about
politics, sex or religion, but around issues of creativity, the nature of the
art object, the past, present and future of the technology on which we depend,
and so on - all very relevant, to me anyway. Our motivations in persevering in
what can at times be an intractable and frustrating subject need frequent
injections of 'ingredient X' - whatever each of us deems that to be - and that
will inevitably find its way to the list, from time to time. I actually find
this the great pleasure and richness of the list - I get a real sense of the
personalities, enthusiasms and indeed prejudices who contribute, so that I do
indeed have a real impression of the Csound 'community' itself.

To echo a recent post, this is surely part of the ethnography of Csound.

Csound is the kernel underwriting all the posts to the list. It is in any case
impossible for anyone to scan all lists just in case the name Plato or Blaise
crops up; I would like to think that those who are interested in and
symapthetic towards such discussions will find their way here one way or
another!

Richard Dobson

Larry Troxler wrote:

> Wow, this csound list has got a lot of off-topic posts lately. I know, I
> probably contribute to some of them. I hate to complain about this, and
> I'm not, really, it's more of an observation.
>
> Should the name of this list be changed? What the new name would be, I'm
> not sure. It is certainly *not* a Csound list any more.
> In fact, it seems to be not even limited to software synthesis.
>
> This is not another complaint against c4tabs, in fact the "pencil"
> discourse was very intriguing, and I'm glad the antiporp decided to
> write in a conventional language this time.
>
> But it has nothing to do with csound.
>
> So what should be done with this list? Personally, most of the topics
> discussed here are of interest to me. But less than half of the messages
> are actually specific to csound. And i think that this may be true of
> many, if not most, readers, judging by the lack of complaints about
> non-csound posts.
>
> Should this list be somehow renamed to something more general?
>
> There are probably a lot of potential readers and contributers that are
> left out because they think this is a csound list, which it is not.
>
> Larry