Blips, Bleeps and Farts created on a rare old school analog modular synthesizer. But we ain’t say’n which one.

Download Blps & Frts CC at ccmixter. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Disclaimer: I’m affiliated with Fugwhump.

James Hearon and Steven Yi have recently released Issue 9 of The Csound Journal. This just might be the strongest issue yet.

• Letters from the Editors
  by James Hearon and Steven Yi
• Python at the Control Rate: athenaCL Generators as Csound Signals
  by Christopher Ariza
• hrtfmove, hrtfstat, hrtfmove2: Using the New HRTF Opcodes
  by Brian Carty
• A Simple NetBeans Java Frontend Application
  by Jim Hearon
• An Interview with Jean-Luc Sinclair(aka Jean-Luc Cohen)
  by Steven Yi
• Using Emacs and Csound-x as a Csound IDE: Part I
  by Pedro Kröger
• Flutes in Orbit
  by Brian Redfern
• A minimal realtime algorithmic system: “Barebones”
  by Øyvind Brandtsegg
• Marginalia: Designing a sound installation using Csound
  by Richard Bowers
• Working with the terminal in OSX: An absolute beginner’s guide
  by Jean-Luc Cohen-Sinclair

The OLPC has donated 8.5+ gigs of samples to the children of the world, and us. This library is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. So feel free to start remixing.

From the official press release:

Several prestigious groups of musicians have donated their sound libraries to One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization focused on providing educational tools to help children in developing countries “learn learning.” The XO laptop’s unique user interface and applications enable children to create and share music, drawings, video, personal diaries and other things they make online with family and friends worldwide.

Leading musicians, colleges and companies making their sound libraries freely available on the XO laptop are: The Berklee College of Music in Boston, Berklee Music Synthesis alumni – including electronic music superstar BT, the international Csound Developer community, M-Audio and Digidesign (parts of Avid Technology, Inc.), and the Open Path Music group.

I want thank Dr. Richard Boulanger for all the time and effort he put into collecting and assembling such a vast and wonderful resource.

Here are my donated samples in three different sampling rates: baby talk plus eurorack, serge and csound synth sounds

• 44.1k
• 22.5k
• 16k

Video posted to YouTube by Elhardt
Link discovered via matrixsynth.com

Here are some experiments I did in trying to mimic the style of Walter/Wendy Carlos’ synthesizer technique and style of timbres. Carlos was using a 1960’s era patchable modular Moog synthesizer with a different architecture than that of the Alesis Andromeda synthesizer. Each one has some advantages and disadvantages over the other but both use analog circuitry.

All I can say is Bravo! As many of my friends can attest to, I’ve listened to a lot of Wendy Carlos over the years. Elhardt has managed to perfect the sound design, arrangement and performance stylings of Carlos. Be sure to check out the Scarlatti piece, too.

I just wanted to announce my latest release, Musiques Pour Cultes, written with composer Severine Baron and realized almost entirely in Csound. Musiques Pour Cultes is a collections of abstract music and soundscapes attempting to establish a connection between music and spirituality, between sound and the physical space that surrounds us.

Musiques Pour Cultes was released on Al’s Records and is available for download on iTunes.

– Jean-Luc Cohen (aka Jean-Luc Sinclair)

You can also listen to Musiques Pour Cultes at MySpace.

I have personally listened to multiple iterations of this piece over the years. Musiques Pour Cultes is full of both rich complexity and subtlety. I highly recommend you to sit in a dark room filled with candles and incense while listening to this beautiful illustration of computer music. It is an experience.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if I owned one of these things, I’d waste all my spare time making audio-based video games for it. This clip looks and sounds like a Jeff Minter game.

Video posted to YouTube by pepemogt
Link stolen from Matrixsynth.com.

thumbuki20080102.csd

The Csound Blog
Issue #11

I want to learn morse code. I don’t know why, I just do. So a few days ago, I made it my new year’s resolution. The first action I took to help me accomplish this goal of mine was writing the Csound instrument Morse Code Sequencer Event Generator, or mcseq for short.

Topics

• Morse Code
• Event Generators
• Sequencers
• String Parsing

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

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.

This custom SID synthesizer sounds absolutely awesome. Listen to it here.

About a month ago, peiman posted a question to the Csound Mailing list about the possiblity “to batch process several audio-files with the same csound code.” Prior to this, I had never considered using Csound in this manner.

After some discussion on the list about how to do this, I presented a simple solution using the command-line. This bash call was then refined by sand-6.

I continued to work on this, as there were still a few unresolved issues. For example, designing Csound instruments that would process mono or stereo files automatically, and being able to set parameters from the command-line. I wrote ShellVerb v0.1 to demonstrate a way to build these abilities into command-line instruments. Though I wasn’t completely happy with my approach.

I revisted ShellVerb yesterday, and came up with ShellVerb v0.2. This version, in theory, works identically to v0.1 as far as the user is concerned. However, I made some changes internally that I hope are a bit more clear to those wishing to analyze the file so they can write their own Csound based command-line audio tools.

It turns out that not only can Csound be used as a batch processor, but it also makes for a damn fine one. Csound is chock full of filters, envelopes, digital siginal processors, spectral processors, etc. From these synthesizer/dsp modules, one can design very complex effects units that would be impractical to implement in most other products out in the wild. Since the original post at the mailing list, I’ve heavily incorporated Csound command-line processors into some of the projects I’m currently working on, with stellar results.

Download:

• ShellVerb v0.2