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by zebproj
2260 days ago
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Csound is a fantastic sound design tool. It was my main composition tool for many years, before I started building my own system. The score/orchestra paradigm is incredibly powerful. It's something I miss quite often in my current system. When I was in music school, I learned how to program by writing programs in Python to generate scores that could then be played by Csound. Scores are so trivial to generate, that you actually don't need to learn that much programming to generating very satisfying algorithmic compositions. I appreciate that the title of this post calls it a "sound and music computing system" rather than a "musical programming language". In truth, Csound is more of a text-based modular synthesis environment than a programming language. As others have said, the orchestra syntax is a bit strange at first, but you do get used to it. Writing Csound code feels more like patching a modular synthesizer rather than writing a computer program. It's basically a DSL for connecting small sound/signal modules (called opcodes) together. Most of the time one thinks about things in terms of signal flow and not computer logic. A common mistake I see new Csounders make is to immediately reach for the conditional statements and loops. They often don't behave the way you expect, so people get frustrated. The Csound dev team has a very strong emphasis on backwards compatibility, to the point where the older opcodes do not get bugfixes in case someone is exploiting the bug in the compositions. The programmer in me groans a little bit, but the composer takes great comfort in the fact that pieces I write now will be playable for many years or even decades (some of the Csound test pieces, like Trapped In Convert by Richard Boulanger or Xanadu by Joeseph Kung, are over 30 years old and still run). I've been told that many works written in MusicN languages (a precursor to Csound) have been ported to run in Csound, which means that the legacy of Csound includes computer music written in the 60s! I wish I knew where to find those, as I quite enjoy computer music history. |
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I agree with this point. I am using Csound for creating VST plugins (with Cabbage framework[1]) for which is Csound extremely productive. I can have working prototype (which I can actually play on my keyboard) ready in something like 15 minutes.
Once you get over somewhat strange syntax[2] and understand difference between k-time and i-time[3] you can do any DSP processing without actually diving into hard math.
Cabbage has nice beginner documentation on Csound[4].
[1]: https://cabbageaudio.com/
[2]: output operand, paramA, paramB
[3]: k-time - on every step of audio processing, i-time - on initialization of instrument/note
[4]: https://cabbageaudio.com/docs/file_structure_and_syntax/