Robot Voices and Android Grooves

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The fourth Csound Blog entry is up.

“One of my earliest synthesizer fascinations was the robotic voice produced by band vocoders. While in college, I stumbled across the vocoder schematics in The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads. Equipped with only Csound and my new-found knowledge, I created my first vocoder instrument. I have since designed many variations, and will likely to continue doing so for many years to come. Because robots rule…”

Topics covered:

  • Band Vocoder
  • Envelope Follower
  • Speech Synthesis

Visit:
The Csound Blog

Csound Journal Issue 5

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The 5th issue of the Csound Journal has been published at cSounds.com. A range of topics are discussed, including Pure Data, an art installation, HPKComposer and Perl. To quote editor Stever Yi, “It never ceases to amaze me the number of different ways that people are using Csound and the wide variety of musics being made.” [source]

I previously mentioned I had written an article for the journal. I’m happy to announce that “Perl and Csound – Part I” is included in this issue. I want to personally thank the editors James Hearon and Steven Yi for giving me the opportunity to contribute to one of my favorite online publications.

TamTam, Csound and the OLPC

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Just last week, a friend of mine was telling me that Csound is included in the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC.)

Last night, I coincidentally stumbled across the development blog for TamTam, “a suite of three applications / activities developed for the $100 laptop.” [source]  The program is implemented using Python and PyGTK, and utilizes Csound as its synthesis engine.  The TamTam GUI appears to be very user-friendly, and reminds me of a simplified version of Max/MSP combined with a midi sequencer.  

The OLCP is, among other things, a musical instrument.  The fact that this musical instrument is going to make its way into the hands of children spanning dozens of cultures fascinates me to no end.

As a side note, I can’t help but think of the NAVI computer in Serial Experiments Lain.  I look forward to the day OLPC laptops become commercially available, so that I may get my hands on one.