This is my second Csound piece, composed while I was enrolled in Dr. Boulanger’s Csound class at the Berklee College of Music. The code has been cleaned up and slightly refactored, though I left all the audio/synth characteristics in tact.

Download (csd + samples): NuclearEnergy.zip

Listen at SoundCloud

What can I say about this piece. The title is a reference to a pro-nuclear movie shown by Waylon Smithers in an episode of The Simpsons (Homer’s Odyssey.) I picked the name last minute on the way over to the ‘Over The Edge’ concert where the piece premiered. The code became the foundation for a Csound tutorial I wrote as part of my Berklee senior project, Exploring Analogue Synth Techniques. The sequencer riff is more or less *borrowed* from Nine Inch Nail’s “Head Like a Hole.” The drum samples were recorded off of my Roland MC-303 Groovebox. I also heard through the grapevine that there were some traditional computer music composers at the time that were none-to-happy to see a sophisticated computer music program like Csound being used in such a way. Back in 1998, it took a good 10-15 minutes to render.

I woke up this morning to an excellent interview with Csound composer Steven Yi about his graphical composition environment Blue. The interview is rich with technological details about the software, including bits about its development history. If you are unfamiliar with Blue, will get you up to speed about what it is and what it can do. If you haven’t played with it, do yourself a favor and give it a try.

Get ready to cancel your afternoon appointments because editors James Hearon and Steven Yi have released issue 13 of the Csound Journal. There’s a little bit of everything, ranging from using the Csound API, to music, to MIDI, and more.

Articles

• Letters from the Editors
• Basic Lua with Csound by Jim Hearon
• Using the Signal Flow Graph Opcodes by Michael Gogins
• Emulating MIDI-based Studio Setups with Csound by Steven Yi
• Working With Strings As Arrays in Csound by Joachim Heintz
• SOLO_MV_10.1 by Enrico Francioni
• Add_Synth by Jacob Joaquin

Pacman is the Google logo for today. If you wait a moment, the game starts up and you can start chomping ghosts and power pills. I have in my personal library an audio recreation of a ghost being eaten by Ms. Pacman. So I thought today would be the perfect day to share.

The Code: blue_ghosts_are_fine_fixins.csd

Listen at SoundCloud

“If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” — Marcus Brigstocke

Modulation works. Barely. I modified the Sine class to accept objects of type UGen as input. Though I think it might be possible to modify class UGen so that all child classes automatically support modulation by default. That’s probably my next step.

Since only the Sine class supports modulation, what better way to test it than to generate some classic FM tones. I created @Instr SimpleFM, which is just that, a simple FM instrument with one modulator oscillator being fed into a carrier oscillator. Here’s the file: fm.py. And here’s the code:

from slipmat import *

@Instr
def SimpleFM(dur, amp, pch, env, index=1, ratio=1):
    freq = cpspch(pch)                            # Convert pch to Hz
    env_1 = RiseFall(dur, env) * UVal(index)      # Index envelope
    env_2 = RiseFall(dur, 0) * UVal(amp)          # Amplitude envelope
    m = Sine(env_1, freq * ratio)                 # Modulator
    c = Sine(env_2, UVal(freq) + UVal(freq) * m)  # Carrier
    return(c)

s = ScoreEvents()
s.event(0, 2, SimpleFM(2, 0.5, 8.03, 0.125, 4))
s.event(2, 2, SimpleFM(2, 0.5, 8.07, 0.5, 16, 2))
s.event(4, 4, SimpleFM(4, 0.3, 7.00, 0.125, 16, 3))
s.event(4, 2, SimpleFM(4, 0.3, 8.05, 0.5, 4))
s.event(6, 2, SimpleFM(2, 0.3, 8.03, 0.5, 4))
ScoreEventsToWave(s, "./fm.wav")

Listen at SoundCloud

Clearly, this audio example is no Stria.

The URL http://csoundblog.com/ now takes you, well, here. I registered this awhile ago, and just learned that Noisepages supports domain mapping. So I’m taking it out for a spin.

The big question mark is whether or not people subscribed to the old RSS feed will continue receiving updates or not. I guess this post will serve as the test.

My first Csound piece, composed in the Spring of 1998 while enrolled in Dr. Boulanger’s Csound class at the Berklee College of Music.

Download: Electronic_Bubbles.csd

Listen at SoundCloud

For the record, any audio resemblance to a bong is purely coincidental. I was first made aware of this comparison as Electronic Bubbles played during my senior recital when an audience member gestured at me. I almost lost it on stage in front of a fully packed recital hall.

I just invested into a SoundCloud Lite account, which allows me to put up all the Slipmat audio examples online for our listening pleasure. Okay, so it’s going to be a lot of boring sine waves for awhile. Though I’ll sneak in the occasional interesting track from time to time.

If you look in the right hand column, you’ll see the Slipmat set play list. I’ll also embed individual tracks into blog posts from here on out.

Slipmat by jacobjoaquin

I did something I should have done awhile ago, and that’s invest into a SoundCloud account. I recently rendered all the Csound Blog examples and uploaded them. So now it’ll be easier for many of you to listen to clips without having to render them yourselves.

The Csound Blog Set List at SoundCloud

Now that the Slipmat dev code is up at github, I can write smaller examples rather than cram everything into one large script. The example test_tone.py is written specifically to demonstrate the simplest possible script that generates audio. Here’s the code:

import slipmat

s = slipmat.ScoreEvents()
s.event(0, 4, slipmat.Sine())
slipmat.ScoreEventsToWave(s, "./test_tone.wav")

This produces a 4-second 440Hz sine tone, and writes it to a wave file.

Here’s the line-by-line run down. First, the slipmat module is imported, essentially turning Python into a synthesizer. Then a score object is created from class slipmat.ScoreEvents(); this is akin to a Csound score file, as it is responsible for scheduling events for unit generators and instruments. A slipmat.Sine() object is instantiated then scheduled to play for 4-seconds using the default frequency of 440Hz. Then slipmat.ScoreEventsToWave() parses the score and renders the audio, writing the results to the file “./test_tone.wav”.

This is how it looks today. As Slipmat changes and evolves, so will this example.