Csound + Processing Experiment I

What started as a series of small experiments in musical Markov chains has led me back to creating Processing sketches with audio; Something I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

You see, one the issues I’ve been struggling with here at the Csound Blog is to make it, well, interesting. Code and synth tricks are all dandy, but ultimately not very accesible since one has to do homework to really get what’s going on. So as a way to reconcile this fact is to incorporate more visual elements that can be passively enjoyed rather than studied. Processing makes the perfect vessel. This doesn’t mean everything I do here will now get a short movie. The fact is, these things will probably be few and far between.

As for the piece, I wanted to incorporate some real-time visuals showing the current node in a musical Markov chain. Though I got side tracked a bit, and went with this morphing Markov design. The network structure itself is based on the de facto Processing algorithm, where edges are drawn between overlapping circles. Just look at the header of the Processing website to see what I mean. All I had to implement that design, animate it, and add audio. The final piece is something between a lava lamp and a wind chime.

I did run into two issues while preparing this video:

1. I have no idea what I’m doing when compressing video for the web. Thus, the low quality. I’ll get better.
2. There is a bug that causes the Csound engine to stop mid-performance for reasons I have not been able to isolate. Thus, I’m limited to showing only two minutes worth. In this case, not a big deal, but I’ll have to overcome this for longer works.

And the code is not yet available, though will be within a couple of weeks.

5 thoughts on “Csound + Processing Experiment I

  1. amazing! It would be cool if you could somehow make the reverse true… manipulate the processing graphs to manipulate csound!

  2. @tehk: That’s not a problem. Just this morning, I had processing randomly changing table values using code. It’s just a matter of slapping on a GUI.

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  5. That is great work,

    Programing visual bidimentinoal soundscapes flexible representatinos is like creating actors for expressing the sound atributs, very interesting