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Long-time user of Csound, Max, and Pd (& have spent a little time with ChucK & Supercollider). Max & Pd are fantastic for incorporating sensors & other physica
by flats 7y ago
Long-time user of Csound, Max, and Pd (& have spent a little time with ChucK & Supercollider).
Max & Pd are fantastic for incorporating sensors & other physical interfaces, real-time interactivity, routing signals, creating visualizations, & all that. Supercollider is fantastic for generative music & using control flow compositionally.
Csound, on the other hand, is really, really great for creating beautiful & nuanced electronic compositions. The sound quality is unrivaled (emphasis on accuracy over interactivity), the interface is great (plain text, which, as a programmer, I prefer), and GEN routines plus the myriad opcodes allow you to do some heavy, intricate aural spelunking.
As a bonus (& as mentioned by others), it’s highly performant & fairly easy to integrate with other languages & environments (including Max & Pd!).
The syntax is a bit strange, but once you get over that, Csound is an amazing piece of software.
- dominotw 7y ago> beautiful & nuanced electronic compositions. wondering if you have any favorites that you can recommend.
- andrewg 7y agoThis one’s my favorite: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TecDlpGAhq0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TecDlpGAhq0 Really beautiful album, especially the 5.1 surround version.
- lukasb 7y agoI clicked the link and was like "ha, what, no way BT uses CSound" but I was wrong! http://simoncpage.co.uk/blog/2008/10/bt-this-binary-universe/ http://simoncpage.co.uk/blog/2008/10/bt-this-binary-universe...
- TheRealPomax 7y agoThere's no real reason to consider csound any different from any other synthesiser in this respect: someone who understands how to program a synth just needs to know "which knobs and switches" there are - whether they're physical hardware, a virtual instrument's GUI, or xml statements doesn't matter all that much... the only thing that matters is being able to set and control VFOs/LFOs, ADSR, resonance, unison, etc. =) And dear lord do some people understand synths.
- kian 7y agoany links to anyone who both has this deep understanding and teaches it?
- TheRealPomax 6y agoYoutube is actually an excellent resource here - search for "intro to Synthesis" or "intro to synthesizers", and move up to "advanced synthesis" (or related terms) and there are boatloads of excellent videos teaching you more than you ever thought was possible.
- tomduncalf 7y agoHaha this was the first track I thought of, you have good taste :)
- acjohnson55 7y agoNot the original author, but I wrote this short piece in CSound years ago for a class on electronic music composition: https://soundcloud.com/acjohnson/wanderers https://soundcloud.com/acjohnson/wanderers It might give you a feel for how you can create compositions that sound very remote from what most people would think of as musical. The whole piece is synthesized sound with "instruments" consisting of various types of signal generators composed together.