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Csound: A sound and music computing system

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Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#41

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

kristopolous wrote: post #13
benpm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

supercollider is way better than csound

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 is exactly my experience with both sc and Csound. (And Max too, for different reasons.)

Csound is based on a synthesis paradigm that dates back to the very first computer music experiments. It started life as a microcomputer implementation of Music 11, which was based on Music IV, which dates back to the 60s - and it hasn't moved on from there.

Meanwhile sc is a masterpiece of software development - a smooth and clever integration of a custom DSL with distributed real-time synthesis.

But musically it's damn near impossible to get it to sound as nice as a mediocre VST, never mind a good one, and the sequencing and event management are eccentric at best.

Essentially these systems are all opinionated frameworks with a huge conceptual overhead. They're supposed to make music-from-DSP easier to learn, but students have to learn DSP and a completely new and unusual programming language at the same time. And that's too much to expect of most people, even for A-grade students with PhD potential.

So they tend to be used for tinkering and for academic music projects. It's not quite true that no worthwhile music has ever been made with these systems, but it's not an exaggeration to say that very little has. And when you include the learning curve, the ratio of time spent to creative benefit is unimpressive.

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#43

Post by DonHopkins »

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project adopted CSound for use in its interactive musical activities via Python.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Csound#One_Laptop_per_Child_(O...

>Csound5 was chosen to be the audio/music development system for the OLPC project on the XO-1 Laptop platform.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound

Csound is the music and audio signal processing language originally developed by MIT's Barry Vercoe and now expanded and maintained by a world-wide community, as Free Software. Csound will provide audio services for the XO computer. Csound is both a programming language and a sound synthesis engine. Csound, as included in the OLPC project, can be used by Activities or directly by children and teachers. It can be accessed in a variety of ways. In the XO platform, two basic ways are provided:

Through the Python programming environment: eg. programmed in Activities.

Through its 'classic' command-line frontend, directly invoking it from the Terminal activity.

Further information about Csound can be found on its official website: http://csounds.com/. The canonical Csound sources and multi-platform binaries are hosted by Sourceforge.

Activities

Csound Editor - view, edit and perform Csound files

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound:Csound_Editor

Audio Loop Remixer - perform audio loops and apply a variety of effects

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound:Audio_Loop_Remixer

MIDI File Player - performs MIDI files using the donated General MIDI soundfont

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound:MIDI_File_Player

Instrument Player - a keyboard interface to play a variety of instruments

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound:Instrument_Player

TamTam - Tam Tam uses Csound, but you would never know it as its interface is designed to wrap the Csound engine with a child-friendly look and feel. This excellent group of Activities allows kids to make sounds, make music, jam, record and transform their voices in an intuitive way. TamTam Edit allows students to patch together Csound's opcodes (modules) and teaches them all about signals, synthesis, and synthesizers. TamTam Activities demonstrate well how the power of Csound can be harnessed in the XO platform.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TamTam

GregCsoundActivities.zip - A number of Csound Server-based activities developed by Greg for Build 542 including a pretty cool Pitch-Tracker Bouncing Ball Activity and a Pitch Reverse Game – both lot's of fun for kids, but not currently supported by the latest builds and security models.

http://csounds.com/GregCsoundActivities.zip

Pippy - Pippy uses Csound to help teach children the Python programming language and to build XO Activities.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pippy

Step - A simple 8-note step sequencer that children will use to play music and record their own loops for use in other sample-based activities. Step uses csndsugui.

http://www.thumbuki.com/xo/step.activity.zip

Funny Talk - An activity that children can use to record their voices with the built-in microphone, and process them with effects such as reverb, echo, chorus, etc. Funny Talk allows a child to save their manipulated voices as soundfiles so that they can be used in other musical activities. Funny Talk uses csndsugui.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound:Funny_Talk

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound_tutorials

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound_TOOTS

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#44

Post by DonHopkins »

benpm wrote: post #6
TheAsprngHacker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain why, for someone who hasn't used this tool?

the syntax for the language is horrible and very difficult to understand, the gui is hard to use and unstable, its just generally worse than other sound programming langs like supercollider

I'm being paid off by CSound, but I sure didn't flag you. It must have been one of the many other people that CSound is paying off. CSound sends me thousands of dollars per month to work from home, safely in isolation! You too can make money fast, by promoting CSound on blogs and web sites across the world wide web, and flagging people who call it trash! Simply email me your social security number, bank account information, and mother's maiden name, and you too can make money by promoting CSound online! Operators are standing by. Order before midnight tonight, or it will be tomorrow. Thanks, CSound! ;)

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#45

Post by vortico »

I'm looking for a volunteer to add Csound as a script backend to VCV Prototype (https://vcvrack.com/Prototype), or any other scripting language of your choice that's not already available. Open an issue if interested. https://github.com/VCVRack/VCV-Prototype#adding-a-script-eng...

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#46

Post by kristopolous »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #41
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 is exactly my experience with both sc and Csound. (And Max too, for different reasons.) Csound is based on a synthesis paradigm that dates back to the very first computer music experiments. It started life as a microcomputer implementation of Music 11, which was based on Music IV, which dates back to the 60s - and it hasn't moved on from there. Meanwhile sc is a masterpiece of software development - a smooth and…

I believe digital tools are scoped like analog ones are - they are appropriate for certain types of projects.

In the same way it would be extremely hard to do say, a convincing rendition of the waldstein sonata on say, a drum kit, the digital tools are great if you want to do what they're designed to do.

This is why some people love one piece of software and hate another in some apparently random distribution, music is a huge tent and these people likely have dramatically different goals. It's like a kosher, a vegan, and a keto arguing over the best restaurant...

The problem is trying to figure out whether it's the wrong tool or whether you just haven't spent enough time learning how to use it.

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#49

Post by DonHopkins »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #41
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 is exactly my experience with both sc and Csound. (And Max too, for different reasons.) Csound is based on a synthesis paradigm that dates back to the very first computer music experiments. It started life as a microcomputer implementation of Music 11, which was based on Music IV, which dates back to the 60s - and it hasn't moved on from there. Meanwhile sc is a masterpiece of software development - a smooth and…

Max/MSP struck me like a very opinionated and schizophrenic elderly camel, who's been across the desert many times: it's wonderful and indispensable in certain situations, but it will get mad and spit on you if you don't treat it right, and it's butt-ugly, and some Max programmers have a way of cultivating and celebrating that butt-uglyness. (See any of AntiOrp's Nato.0+55+3d code!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

The author of Nato.0+55+3d, Netochka Nezvanova, aka "nameless nobody", "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_%28author%2...

A typical AntiOrp-style NATO patch:

https://enacademic.com/pictures/enwiki/78/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d.p...

Some neater examples, and an in-depth description of Nato, by Jeremy Bornstein:

http://www.bootsquad.com/old_site/nato/nato00.html

Max has got layers and layers of experience built up over the decades, but no one clear model or consistent way of doing things. It's got so many different opinions, or programming paradigms, that aren't necessarily consistent with each other and don't fit together well. Some people love it, because it happens to have the combination of programming paradigms that they like. But when you're starting out, it's hard to figure out the best way to do anything, because there are so many different competing ways. In that sense, it's extremely un-Pythonic, like visual Perl.

Here's a video that shows some great examples of Max/Nato code. Remember, this was before Cycling '74 created Jitter (which pissed off AntiOrp who considered it a rip-off of Nato). Nato supported many features of QuickTime, including reading and writing live RTP video streams over the network. So Nato "operators" would exchange live QuickTime RTP video streams back and forth over the network (both LAN and Internet) and jam together in live distributed performances, sending the video from one Mac to the other, near and far, mutating and remixing and layering in live video each hop, projecting it on screens, and feeding it back and forth between different "operators" who were writing and editing the code in real time.

Max_MSP_nato.0+55+3d 's_app_run_on_El_Capitan_test 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0kQcnetR9M

Here's more about Nato:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753758

>Nato.0+55+3d (released in 1999) was an amazing but notorious extension for Max that enabled live programming of real time video manipulation, networking and display. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

>"At the time of its release (the summer of 1999), NATO.0+55+3d was in demand as it appeared several years before other similar infrastructures such as GEM and Jitter (released by the makers of Max/MSP in October 2002). Earlier software such as Image/ine developed in 1997 at STEIM was drawing in a similar direction, but the fact that NATO.0+55+3d was operating inside the Max/MSP framework, using its "visual programming" protocol, provided at the same time greater ease of use and more flexibility, allowing the user to create his own applications and tools. It gained popularity among video artists and performers, who were using it for a large variety of purposes, prominently for live performance and interactive installation."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22352276

>Bravo! If you enjoyed that anti-Max performance art trolling, but thought it wasn't spectacularly hyperbolic and sociopathic enough, I recommend looking up some of the classic flames on the nettime mailing list by Netochka Nezvanova aka "NN" aka "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

>Netochka Nezvanova is the pseudonym used by the author(s) of nato.0+55+3d, a real-time, modular, video and multi-media processing environment. Alternate aliases include "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp". The name itself is adopted from the main character of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's first novel Netochka Nezvanova (1849) and translates as "nameless nobody."

>She (or he or they or it) were the author of the NATO.0+55+3d set of extensions for Max, which predated Jitter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

The most feared woman on the Internet

http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/

>Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?

>The name Netochka Nezvanova is a pseudonym borrowed from the main character of Fyodor Dostoevski’s first novel; it translates loosely as “nameless nobody.” Her fans, her critics, her customers and her victims alike refer to her as a “being” or an “entity.” The rumors and speculation about her range all over the map. Is she one person with multiple identities? A female New Zealander artist, a male Icelander musician or an Eastern European collective conspiracy? The mystery only propagates her legend.

Cramer, Florian. (2005) "Software dystopia: Netochka Nezvanova - Code as cult" in Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, Chapter 4, Automatisms and Their Constraints. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070215185215/http://pzwart.wdk...

Re: Csound: A sound and music computing system

#50

Post by DonHopkins »

From "Recontextualizing Ambient Music in Csound" by Kim Cascone, on the CSound Community web site:

http://csounds.com/

http://csounds.com/cascone/

"One of the motives for being an artist is to recreate a condition where you're actually out of your depth, where you're uncertain, no longer controlling yourself, yet you're generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what they're doing, is the surfing" — Brian Eno (Aurora Musicalis. ArtForum Magazine. 24:10. 1986)

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