Kevin Shrieve wrote:
> What are Csound compositions?
>
A short question with a long answer!
FIrst some links:
The "official" front page:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/csound/frontpage.html
Dave Phillips' Linux Csound page:
http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_csound.html
The Csound Magazine:
http://www.werewolf.net/~hljmm/Ezine/
Csound is described, variously, as "the POVray of sound", or a "waveform
compiler", or a "software synthesizer."
It is descended from the Music IV family of software-synthesis systems
pioneered at various universities in the sixties and seventies. These
were the first systems used to make music with computers, and were
instrumental in the development of nearly all digital synthesis
techniques (additive, FM, waveshaping, digital sampling, physical
modelling, etc.)
Csound is free, but is not Free Software. Some points of the license are
not quite clear, but certainly your own csound orcs and sco's are yours
to distribute as you see fit.
There are other soft-synth languages in use today, notably Common Lisp
Music and Cmix, but Csound probably has the largest user base and the
largest set of built-in functions (though NOT the most flexible syntax.)
To use csound, one writes an "orchestra file" (foo.orc) containing a
description of any number of sound-producing "instruments". Then one
writes (or generates via some other means) a "score file" (bar.sco)
which tells which instruments to play at what time and passes any number
of controlling parameters (called "p-fields") for each "note".
The flexibility is enormous, but the learning curve is rather steep; the
Csound syntax is rather archaic. The "C" stands for the language csound
is implemented in; csound orc / sco syntax doesn't resemble C very much.
Fortunately there is an active mailing list, a ton of websites, and
dozens of other people's orcs and scores that you can download and play
with.
You can also get realtime control from MIDI keyboards, and realtime
output to a soundcard, but you need a speedy computer to do anything
that sounds cool in realtime. (Although, sample playback is not very
CPU-intensive... csound does a pretty good job of being a sampler.)
THere are also tools to convert basic MIDI files to csound scores.
Did that answer your question? :)
--PW
