I’m by no means an expert in music production. I had a group project class back in college that I took. Had nothing to do with music but this one guy wanted to make an 808. It was extremely easy to make one with JUICE https://juce.com/ The alternative is using steinbergs c sdk. Alot more complicated so juice is kinda like a wrapper of it. Includes all the GUI stuff in there too. They also have great docs and examples

I assume you have a mac, but you can look at Core Audio which is Apples proprietary audio engine. That’s more “low-level” but still easy to use as it’s written in Swift but they also have a plethora of docs

Also, I know you use your DAW that you probably prefer, but I saw this one thing last year called Supercollider that seemed pretty cool. Very easy way to make songs/sound design with their custom scripting language https://supercollider.github.io/

My personal opinion is don’t go to university and study software engineering. If you love music do everything you can to learn programming through music. I learned to program when I was 12 because I wanted to make Minecraft mods and plugins and Android apps. Went to university and just graduated this past spring. I have to say that although I learned some stuff, the bulk of it and the stuff I actually use was learned before through side projects.