Dr. Richard Boulanger asks Max Mathews about H.A.L. and why it sings Daisy in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Csound is starting off the new year with a bang, as the cSounds.com homepage has just launched a new and much improved design. And who do we have to thank for this?

Thanks to the incredible initiative, talent, dedication and expertise of our brilliant new administrator – Cesare Marilungo, over the next few weeks and months, you will enjoy a new look, a new organization, and *many* new features, resources and developments here at cSounds.com! – Dr. B.

And just in case you are wondering what Csound is…

Csound is a computer music programming language with roots extending all the way back to Max V. Mathews Music-N languages. As far as digitial synthesizers are concerned, Csound is as vintage as they come.

thumbuki20070214.csd

The fifth Csound Blog entry is up.

“According to wikipedia, convolution is ‘a mathematical operator which takes two functions f and g and produces a third function that in a sense represents the amount of overlap between f and a reversed and translated version of g.’ However, this explanation tells us little about convolution as applied to audio…”

Topics covered:

• Convolution
• Impulse Response
• Reverb
• Filter

More at The Csound Blog. For more information about Csound, please visit cSounds.com.

Halloween by Hans Mikelson:

hallown.orc
hallown.sco

You’ll need to download Csound to render these two text files into an audio file. And in case you are wondering what Csound is:

“Csound is an incredibly powerful and versatile software synthesis program. Drawing from a toolkit of over 450 signal processing modules, one can use Csound to model virtually any commercial synthesizer or multi-effects processor. Csound literally transforms a personal computer into a high-end digital audio workstation — an environment in which the worlds of sound-design, acoustic research, digital audio production and computer music composition all join together in the ultimate expressive instrument.” – Dr. Richard Boulanger (source)

In other words, a straight-up hard-core modular computer music language. Csound makes my top three list of favorite synthesizers of all time. For more info, visit Csounds.com.