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Csound: A sound and music computing system

csound.com

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Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#21

Post by kristopolous »

basementcat wrote: post #18
kristopolous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly find it way way easier to do FFTW manually in C and then convert the output with ffmpeg then use supercollider, like by a significant number of orders of magnitude. I've given sc 5 years, usually I'll try to use it, give it a few days of effort to do what I want, then give up, rewrite what I want in C, and be done with it in an hour Some people love it. More power to them. I wish I was one of them

This has got to be one of the sickest burns I've ever seen.

I'm not trying to burn anyone. The people who make the project really care about it and have put a lot of effort in it. I personally am just too stupid to figure it out.

I think like Haskell and R it's designed for a different profession so to people like me who are programmers first I am scratching my head the whole time. I can do some thing in it, yeah eventually, usually...

The documentation appears complete and I'm sure the compilers are well written, an enormous amount of effort went into it, it's just a problem with me here.

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#22

Post by phlakaton »

rkagerer wrote: post #9

What does it do? These hint at some neat possibilities but I still don't get it: a sound and music computing system a tool for composing electro-acoustic pieces real-time

At its base, it is a system that takes a programmatic score, as well as programmatic descriptions of synthesized instruments or processors, and produces audio output. Other tools in this category include CLM, Supercollider, and STK, though Csound has a history that predates all of them.

What makes it different from popular music tools is that you are in control of the instruments' guts, and can create custom instruments, so you can apply virtually any form of synthesis, any type of audio transformation or generation, you can imagine. This makes it ideal for experimenting with synthesis and algorithmic composition.

"Electro-acoustic" is an academic term that encompasses various forms of experimental music and research involving artificial sound sources, including electronic music, electric instruments, tape loops and manipulation, computer-generated music, and so forth. Roughly: "any avant-garde music that requires loudspeakers to perform." You can of course use Csound for more popular music applications as well, but you would typically find traditional DAW tools to be more convenient in those cases.

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#24

Post by kristopolous »

klyrs wrote: post #20
benpm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

supercollider is way better than csound

You're getting downvoted and flagged became you're violating site guidelines, and it kinda looks like you've made two throwaway accounts to do so. You like supercollider. That's fine but it doesn't make csound "trash." You want a gui. That's fine, but csound users like myself and others here prefer a solid scripting environment.

Thanks. As a rule on HN, everyone should act like the author of what they're thinking of trashing is reading through the comments and will take your comments about their hard work in open source to heart, this happens more than you think.

If you wouldn't say it to the author, don't say it here, because it's often the same thing

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#25

Post by kroger »

bensonalec wrote: post #11
rkagerer wrote: post #9

What does it do? These hint at some neat possibilities but I still don't get it: a sound and music computing system a tool for composing electro-acoustic pieces real-time

Basically it's for creating music programmatically, conceptually it's solid although it does lack some major features (you have to convert frequencies to notes, and as far as I'm aware there's no inherent option to use the note itself).

You can use different ways to enter pitch [0]. A common way is to use the "octave.pitch" format, such as 08.04, where 08 is the central octave (if I remember correctly) and 04 is the note E. It's common to use a score generator such as PythonScore [1, 2], and some people (myself included) like to use a regular programming language to generate the scores. I've used Common Lisp, Tcl, and Python in the past. Csound has a few frontends [3] that people may like. AFAIK, Csound can read notes from a MIDI keyboard as well.

[0] http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/PitchTop.html

[1] http://jacobjoaquin.github.io/csd/pysco.html

[2] http://write.flossmanuals.net/csound/methods-of-writing-csou...

[3] https://csound.com/frontends.html

EDIT: remove some repetition

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#26

Post by shams93 »

rkagerer wrote: post #9

What does it do? These hint at some neat possibilities but I still don't get it: a sound and music computing system a tool for composing electro-acoustic pieces real-time

You often find it in the heart of VST/AU plugins, within ios and android apps. Now it can work from the web. Its also heavily used in games for programmatic sound effects. But its more of a library or framework for audio/midi rather than a full blown user facing system like Max/MSP.

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#28

Post by musikele »

I've used CSound for a university project some years ago, to manipulate a bunch of files to play together - adjust volumes, modify speed of playing without modifying tonality, etc. I then wrote a GUI to manage CSound. After 8 years, here's what I remember:

- It was very complicated to wrap a C library in Java, at least for a new graduate like me.

- There was no learning material for the kind of things I needed to do (manipulating wav files). learing CSound at the time was a mess - no blog posts in 2010.

- If I read the CSound source file I wrote in 2010 I'm sure I would not understand a single line.

Some years later, when Coursera was just starting to offer free courses to the world, I encountered another musical programming language called ChucK (https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/). The course was very well done and ChucK too, was so simple that I almost decided to rewrite the whole project with it. I wrote some very nice pieces of music while studying ChucK.

Good luck to all the musicians out there!

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#29

Post by dang »

kristopolous wrote: post #24
klyrs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvoted and flagged became you're violating site guidelines, and it kinda looks like you've made two throwaway accounts to do so. You like supercollider. That's fine but it doesn't make csound "trash." You want a gui. That's fine, but csound users like myself and others here prefer a solid scripting environment.

Thanks. As a rule on HN, everyone should act like the author of what they're thinking of trashing is reading through the comments and will take your comments about their hard work in open source to heart, this happens more than you think. If you wouldn't say it to the author, don't say it here, because it's often the same thing

That's particularly true because HN threads usually have high search ranking. Anyone personally connected to a theme can easily get directed to an HN thread on that topic. That includes authors and project creators. It also includes family members of people being discussed.

There was a horrible case yesterday where someone died and the thread filled up with generic dross. People weren't being malicious. It's just what happens when internet commenters aren't familiar with the specifics of a topic (more about that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027453). But we ended up getting an anguished email from someone close to the person who had just died.

This is a systemic problem and I wish we knew what to do about it.

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#30

Post by TheAsprngHacker »

dang wrote: post #29
kristopolous wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. As a rule on HN, everyone should act like the author of what they're thinking of trashing is reading through the comments and will take your comments about their hard work in open source to heart, this happens more than you think. If you wouldn't say it to the author, don't say it here, because it's often the same thing

That's particularly true because HN threads usually have high search ranking. Anyone personally connected to a theme can easily get directed to an HN thread on that topic. That includes authors and project creators. It also includes family members of people being discussed. There was a horrible case yesterday where someone died and the thread filled up with generic dross. People weren't being malicious. It's just wha…

Hi, maybe this is offtopic, but I felt this way when anime studio KyoAni was arsoned and many of its employees died in a horrific way, and the news got to the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20468395

Even though the people there weren't necessarily violating the site guidelines per se, the commentary that some people were making (e.g. discussion about IP stemming from the murderer's unsubstantiated accusation of plagiarism, or discussion about Japan's culture) felt insensitive and hurt me as someone who was greatly impacted by KyoAni's work. I didn't understand how to express my feelings about this, but the way you describe it ("generic dross") explains it perfectly.

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