Tag Archives: Csound

Lingua Franca

Posted on November 11, 2010 by midiguru

So you’re describing the human species to a xenosociologist named Erbq, who comes from a planet somewhere near Aldebaran. You tell him (actually, Erbq is a him/2, but let’s not get into that) that we humans use tools and communicate using spoken … Continue reading →

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QuteCsound 0.6.0 Released

Posted on July 26, 2010 by midiguru

Good news — Andres Cabrera has officially released version 0.6.0 of QuteCsound. It’s available for download at SourceForge. If you’ve never used Csound, this won’t mean anything to you … unless you’re tempted to try it. QuteCsound is a very … Continue reading →

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Code

Posted on June 10, 2010 by midiguru

If it was easy, everybody would do it. That’s a motto that I’ve found to apply to quite a lot of human endeavors. Playing the cello, certainly — but also putting together a portable, yet highly functional workstation for playing … Continue reading →

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More About Tunings

Posted on June 1, 2010 by midiguru

Thanks to the improved workflow in QuteCsound, it’s getting easier to experiment with alternate tuning systems. Also, I’ve learned a couple of tricks for organizing Csound scores. While enjoying the pure sounds of just intonation, I’ve been realizing that I … Continue reading →

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It’s … Blue

Posted on January 24, 2010 by midiguru

Creating music with Csound is a slow and fiddly process, granted.  But I’m still playing with it. The essential thing, it seem to me, is this: Conventional music software makes certain assumptions about your music — that it will have … Continue reading →

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Smooooth

Posted on January 16, 2010 by midiguru

Computer programming is a fun hobby. (Yeah, I got straight A’s in math. You got a problem with that?) Actually writing a functioning Windows or MacOS application from the ground up would be way too much work. Fortunately, there’s no need to. Today we … Continue reading →

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Getting Real (Time)

Posted on January 4, 2010 by midiguru

One of tonight’s experiments was learning how to play Csound synthesizers from a MIDI keyboard. I recall vaguely having some problems a couple of years ago when I tried this, but for whatever reason, it was working okay tonight. Not … Continue reading →

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Too Many Notes

Posted on January 3, 2010 by midiguru

It was 1983, or possibly the end of 1982. The first keyboard with MIDI, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-600, had just been released. The magazine where I worked (Keyboard) was keen to write about the new technology. So we prevailed upon … Continue reading →

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Vocal Synthesis

Posted on January 2, 2010 by midiguru

Csound’s fof opcode synthesizes vocal formants very nicely. (Yeah, that’s what it’s called — fof. Don’t ask me why.) It can produce haunting “ahh” and “ooh” sounds that would be hard to generate with any commercial synthesizer. Well, maybe you could do … Continue reading →

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Sounding Board

Posted on January 1, 2010 by midiguru

A day of discoveries. This morning I decided that Csound’s built-in reverb generators are really just too awful for words, so I created a nice-sounding digital reverb from scratch. It wasn’t at all clear, when I started, that I had the DSP … Continue reading →

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